Kerouac remained a Catholic all his life, though in the course of his erratic life he made a serious commitment to Zen Buddhism. The religious duality points to a general split between order and chaos, powerful tradition and extreme novelty, which seems to have been one of the characteristics he hoped Buddhism could resolve. Kerouac’s later books, including The Dharma Bums (1958), Big Sur (1962), and Visions of Cody (1972), were modestly successful, but none of them achieved the level of attention and popularity attained by On the Road. A slice-of-life novel, it captures a fringe variant of life in mid-twentieth-century America, given to wild and unpredictable experimentation with travel, sex, drugs, and friendship.
Victory and the suburb. In 1945 the United States emerged from World War II as the uncontested military and political power in the western world. The defeat of Germany and Japan would have been impossible without the Unites States, and for its pains it garnered much international credit as the leading power of the free world. The unleashing of the full potential of the American economy during the war had brought not only victory to the Allied countries, but also jobs to Americans (both men and women) at home, which in turn brought secure incomes and upward social mobility.
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