Jack Kerouac is among the most important and influential writers to emerge from mid-twentieth- century America. Father of the Beat literary movement, Kerouac’s most famous novel, On the Road, was known as the bible of this generation, and inspired untold people to question the rigid social and cultural expectations of 1950s America. And yet despite its undeniable influence, On the Road is only a small piece of Kerouac’s literary achievement, as more than forty other books by him have been published. The centerpiece to this work is Kerouac’s multi-volume Duluoz Legend, named for his fictional alter-ego, Jack Duluoz, and comprising numerous books written over decades that together tell the story of Duluoz’s life and times. This Companion offers fresh perspectives on Kerouac’s multifaceted body of work, ranging from detailed analyses of his most significant books to wide-angle perspectives that place Kerouac in key literary, theoretical, and cultural contexts.

This chapter examines Kerouac’s later novels such as Big Sur, Satori in Paris, Desolation Angels, and Vanity of Duluoz, showing how he developed a “late style” that was a response to the way his image and writing were commodified by popular and literary culture. These late novels portray the author-narrator as out of step with a culture that has passed him by, as Kerouac suggests the ways his fame as the so-called “King of the Beatniks” led to both his increasing alcoholism, and to new ways of looking at himself in his writing.

In 1983, pioneering scholar Ann Charters oversaw the publication of The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, a two-volume collection of entries on more than sixty figures associated with the movement. Released roughly a quarter century after groundbreaking work like Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (1956) and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), this project staked a claim for the ongoing relevance of the Beats by presenting them not as a small clique of writer-friends, but as a more far-reaching literary movement and cultural phenomenon. In the spirit of such capaciousness, Charters brought Bob Dylan into the Beat fold, and contributing scholar Joseph Wenke argued that the songwriter merited inclusion because he shared Beat “attitudes toward social authority, politics, and drugs, emphasizing the primacy of the self and rejecting institutionally prescribed norms. … the style of Dylan’s most characteristic lyrics unmistakably reveals that Beat poetry was a strong influence on him as he developed into the most provocative and imaginative lyricist of his generation.”1 This two-pronged notion, that Dylan shared both social “attitudes” with the Beats and that his work bears the marks of their formal techniques and thematic preoccupations, has been a starting point for those who have thought about him in a Beat context.2

This chapter explains the origins of the Beat Generation. It recounts the killing of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr, and how this event was fictionalized by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs in their novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.

This chapter examines Beat works of the 1960s to explain how they remade language use: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s novel Her, Gregory Corso’s novel The American Express, Ted Joans’s collage project The Hipsters, and William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up collaboration, Minutes to Go.

This chapter explores avant-garde literary communities at mid-century, and explains the relationship between the Beats, Black Mountain College, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the New York School.

This chapter looks at the significance of the Vietnam War and its impact on Beat writing. It begins with an analysis of Ginsberg's poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” and then looks at the work of Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, and Bob Dylan, among others.