Who was Jack Kerouac?
Kerouac’s place in literary history is undecided. He brought a new style to the literary landscape, often called “Bop Spontaneous prose.” It’s an approach meant to convey the truth in a particular moment, to hit emotional chords the way Bop Jazz did in the ’40s. When he wrote, it was of his own and his close friends’ experiences. Those experiences included lots of sex, drugs, train-hopping, and car-stealing. It was a radically different approach to the American novel, and it worked for Kerouac. On the Road was supposedly written in just three weeks, on one continuous scroll. It was his first novel published in the trademark style, and has been translated into 33 languages since then, but still has not been universally embraced. “As far as his literary impact,” Inchausti said, “it’s probably been a mixed bag because people try to imitate his style without his sympathy for the world. He gets confused with the imitators.” The author Truman Capote famously dismissed his work, and his marat
” we asked everyone. “Who’s he?” Ace Adams, pitching instructor for the Spinners, asked back, bluntly, without curiosity. “I’m from Australia,” offered Spinner skipper Jon Deeble, by way of excusing himself. “Never heard of him,” said Andy Stewart, commander of the Crosscutters. “But I’d like to know about him. Who was he?” Alas, at that moment he ran off to confer with Deeble and the arbiters. Likewise, the youth were in the dark. As Red Sox short-season apprentices, they may be “On the Road to Fenway,” as the Spinners’ slogan boasts, but they don’t know Jack, as our queries proved. Others were more hep, more down with the beat. A local dancer named Natalie Merchant, who said she’s also an aspiring singer, lamented, “Hey Jack Kerouac, I think of your mother and the tears she cried, she cried for none other than her little boy lost in our little world that hated and that dared to drag him down. Her little boy courageous who chose his words from mouths of babes got lost in the woods. Hi
And why does he matter to us still? This, it seems, is the moment to ask such questions, with September 5 marking the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Road. Certainly, there’s no shortage of books to commemorate the occasion. The Library of America has just put out Road Novels 1957–1960, a collection featuring On the Road, The Dharma Bums (1958), The Subterraneans (1958), Tristessa (1960), and Lonesome Traveler (1960), as well as a selection of journal entries, and Viking, On the Road’s original publisher, has released the text of the novel’s scroll manuscript, the uncorrected version of the book that Kerouac delivered in 1951 to Robert Giroux, who had edited his first novel, The Town and the City (1950), for Harcourt, Brace. (Viking has also issued New York Times reporter John Leland’s Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road.) Other, less essential volumes are also available: Jack Kerouac’s American Journey: The Real-Life Odyssey of On the Road by Kerouac biog
