![]() ![]() In his life and through his writing, Kerouac is, in many ways and rightly so, synonymous with the term Beat. ![]() ![]() And Kerouac’s deep spirituality-the complex, at times conflicted, dialectic of the French-Canadian Catholicism of his childhood and the Buddhism that he explored as an adult-also deserves full study. Kerouac’s colorful life and influence on his Beat contemporaries, especially Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, deserve full study, as does his ability (especially in his two most widely read novels, On the Road and The Dharma Bums) to respond to emerging social patterns and possibilities for identity and thereby both record and help shape the zeitgeist of the 1950s. Even the oft-rehearsed story of how he drafted On the Road in a mere three weeks, typing it onto a 120foot “scroll,” is usually treated as an occasion for biographical celebration rather than something to analyze and assess. ![]() Yet we have tended to focus more on Kerouac’s life than what he wrote, how he wrote, or the significance of his writing practice. As his friend John Clellon Holmes so aptly put it, “a word man,” a writer. ![]()
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