With criticisms like Know - Nothing Bohemian and the latrine laureate of Hobohemia. Kerouac became extremely disillusioned with the press and felt like he was involved in a plot. Kerouac had wanted his books to read like long private letters for anyone to take from what they needed. However, frustrated and bitter by what he felt was abuse, his writings began to loose their power and Jean Louis Kerouac determinedly drunk himself to death in October of 1969. He lived with his third wife Stella and, of coarse, his mother in Florida. Although the ending to his story was bad Kerouac has left a rich, romanticized legacy behind him.

The true poetics of KerouacÕs accomplishments are just now being recognized. His art was the recreation of the American myth. His life and art was the nightmare version of the American dream that repelled and fascinated those around. Although Kerouac will forever be connected to On the Road, he thought himself the writer of one big book which he planned to organize after he settled into old age. Jokingly calling this project, A divine comedy of the BuddhÕ, would be the collection of 19 books he wrote and brought together and called Legend of Duluoz. KerouacÕs legend is the progression of language used book after book. His search for the right words to describe the breakdown of traditions he saw all around him. In the book Angelhead Hipster: A life of Jack Kerouac, author John Clellon Holmes, who met Kerouac in1948, believed in KerouacÕs writing abilities. He believed Jack had found the words to celebrate their lives and times. KerouacÕs first novel The Town and the City was published in 1950 to good reviews but little sells. This book was considered too much of a parody of the writings of Thomas Wolfe. His second book On the Road was published in 1957. On the Road was written as one long paragraph on a roll of Teletype paper. Although Kerouac insisted that his writing was spontaneous his books went through several revisions according o Viking Publishings. In fact Visions of Cody, KerouacÕs definitive artistic work, was in fact the fourth edition of On the Road. The fifth version was the one published as On the Road. Often compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kerouac had the ability to Ôcombine radical stylistic innovation with a fundamentally biographical impulseÕ according to Holmes. Ironically this characteristic, which was hailed by Holmes, was the very reason critics chastised Kerouac as the ÔKing of the BeatsÕ and his books were viewed as sloppy, amateurish, autobiographical chronicles of his childhood and early beat life. Of coarse, 31 years after KeruoacÕs death critics can see, in hindsight, the perfection and flaws of his writing. Some critics have said that Kerouac belongs to the early stages of the cold war. Another critic has said that KerouacÕs 100 percent personal honesty makes little sense outside its Cold War context... So call him the writer of the pre history of post modernism. On the other hand what Kerouac had to offer was his gift for expressiveness, the mobility, the excitement and sheer vulnerability of his prose

previous

Porfolio Page