Kerouac is generally considered to be the father of the Beat movement, although it must be said that he actively disliked such labels, and, in particular, regarded the subsequent Hippie movement with some disdain. Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of Jazz, especially the Bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and others. Later, Kerouac would include ideas he developed in his Buddhist studies, beginning with Gary Snyder. He called this style Spontaneous Prose, a literary technique akin to stream of consciousness.

Many of his books exemplified this approach including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans. The central features of this writing method were the ideas of breath (borrowed from Jazz and from Buddhist meditation breathing), improvising words over the inherent structures of mind and language, and not editing a single word (much of his work was edited by Donald Merriam Allen, a major figure in Beat Generation poetry who also edited some of Ginsberg's work as well). Connected with his idea of breath was the elimination of the period, preferring to use a long, connecting dash instead. As such, the phrases occurring between dashes might resemble improvisational jazz licks. When spoken, the words might take on a certain kind of rhythm, though none of it pre-meditated.

Kerouac greatly admired Gary Snyder, many of whose ideas influenced him. The Dharma Bums contains accounts of a mountain climbing trip Kerouac took with Snyder, and also whole paragraphs from letters Snyder had written to Kerouac.^[24] While living with Snyder outside Mill Valley, California in 1956, Kerouac was working on a book centering around Snyder, which he was thinking of calling Visions of Gary.^[25] (This eventually became Dharma Bums, which Kerouac described as "mostly about [Snyder]".)^[26] That summer, Kerouac took a job as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades in Washington, after hearing Snyder's and Philip Whalen's accounts of their own lookout stints. Kerouac described the experience in his novel Desolation Angels.

He would go on for hours, often drunk, to friends and strangers about his method. Allen Ginsberg, initially unimpressed, would later be one of its great proponents, and indeed, he was apparently influenced by Kerouac's free flowing prose method of writing in the composition of his masterpiece "Howl". It was at about the time that Kerouac wrote The Subterraneans that he was approached by Ginsberg and others to formally explicate exactly how he wrote it, how he did Spontaneous Prose. Among the writings he set down specifically about his Spontaneous Prose method, the most concise would be Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of thirty "essentials."

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh..." from On the Road

Some believed that at times Kerouac's writing technique did not produce lively or energetic prose. Truman Capote famously said about Kerouac's work, "That's not writing, it's typing." Despite such criticism, it should be kept in mind that what Kerouac said about writing and how he wrote are sometimes seen to be separate. According to Carolyn Cassady and other people who knew him he rewrote and rewrote. Some claim his own style was in no way spontaneous. However it should be taken into account that throughout most of the '50s, Kerouac was constantly trying to have his work published, and consequently he often revised and re-arranged manuscripts in an often futile attempt to interest publishers, as is clearly documented in his collected letters (which are in themselves wonderful examples of his style). The Subterraneans and Visions of Cody are possibly the best examples of Kerouac's free-flowing spontaneous prose method.

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Influences

His technique was heavily influenced by Jazz, especially Bebop, and later, Buddhism, as well as the famous "Joan Anderson letter", authored by Neal Cassady.^[27]

The Diamond Sutra was the most important Buddhist text for Kerouac, and "probably one of the three or four most influential things he ever read."^[28] In 1955, he began an intensive study of this sutra, in a repeating weekly cycle, devoting one day to each of the six Pāramitās, and the seventh to the concluding passage on Samādhi. This was his sole reading on Desolation Peak, and he hoped by this means to condition his mind to emptiness, and possibly to have a vision.^[29]

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Legacy

Kerouac is considered by some as the "King of the Beats", a title with which Kerouac himself was deeply uncomfortable.

Kerouac's plainspeak manner of writing prose, as well as his nearly long-form haiku style of poetry have inspired countless modern neo-beat writers and artists, such as painter George Condo, poet and philosopher Roger Craton, and filmaker John McNaughton.

In 1974 the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was open in his honor by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at Naropa University, a private Buddhist University in Boulder, Colorado. The school offers an MFA in Writing & Poetics, a BA in Writing and Literature, a Summer Writing Program, and MFA in Creative Writing.^[30]

In 2007, Kerouac was awarded a posthumous honorary degree from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.^[31]

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References

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Further reading

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Bibliography of Jack Kerouac. (Discuss)

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External links

The external links in this article may not follow Wikipedia's content policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links.

• Kerouac Family Association bilingual Web Site
• Kerouac.com — Online Resource
• Jack Kerouac's Life
• Jack Kerouac GLBT page
• Jack Kerouac Bibliography
• Books comprising Jack Kerouac's Duluoz legend
• Key to the characters in Jack Kerouac's books, and their real-life counterparts
• Key to the real people represented in Jack Kerouac's books, and their fictional counterparts
• A more complete Jack Kerouac Character Key from the everything2 site
• Kerouac Alley — Jack Kerouac directory
• Interview with Jack Kerouac (Montreal, 1967) (in French)
• Blyler, Kerouac, and Bohemian Roads — Article linking Kerouac's novel On the Road with D.A. Blyler's Steffi's Club.
• American Writers: Jack Kerouac — A two-hour C-SPAN television show about Jack Kerouac
• Jack Kerouac's Road - A Franco-American Odyssey - A 1989 National Film Board of Canada production, directed by Herménégilde Chiasson
• "A Vision of Kerouac as The Shadow" — a six page comic about two guys in Indiana talking about Kerouac
• "About the Beat Generation", by Jack Kerouac — a definition of the Beat Generation in Kerouac's own words
• Dharma Bummed: A Marxist Analysis of Jack Kerouac and the Beats
• Language Is A Virus Kerouac's 'Belief and Technique for Modern Prose' and 'Essentials of Spontaneous Prose'
• Denver Beat Photo Tour
• Photos of the Kerouac Gas Station in Longmont, CO
• Neal Cassady's official site authored by his family and updated monthly with stories and photos
• Photos, Jack Kerouac's Last House, St. Petersburg, FL
• Dharma Beat — A Jack Kerouac website with articles on Kerouac including a Calendar and a Links page
• Jack Kerouac Project website
• Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! festival site
• Analysis of Kerouac's life and works from a Roman Catholic perspective
• A selection of front covers of various editions of On the Road
• Guardian article on the history of the play Beat Generation, written and left unpublished for almost 50 years
• The beat goes on: Tracing Kerouac's tracks 50 years later: A restless spirit and 'holy' pie endure By Charles M. Sennott, Boston Globe Staff | July 15, 2007
• On the Road Again: Friends and scholars recall the man behind the myth of Jack Kerouac. Compiled by Meghan O'Rourke, Slate, September 4, 2007

v • d • e Books by Jack Kerouac The Town and the City · On the Road · The Subterraneans · The Dharma Bums · Doctor Sax · Maggie Cassidy · Mexico City Blues · Book of Dreams · Tristessa · Visions of Cody · Lonesome Traveler · Big Sur · Visions of Gerard · Desolation Angels · Satori in Paris · Vanity of Duluoz · Pic · Scattered Poems · Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings · Old Angel Midnight · Good Blonde & Others · Orpheus Emerged · Book of Sketches · The Scripture of the Golden Eternity · And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (unpublished)

Persondata
NAME	Kerouac, Jack
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American novelist and poet
DATE OF BIRTH	March 12, 1922(1922-03-12)
PLACE OF BIRTH	Lowell, Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH	October 21, 1969
PLACE OF DEATH	St. Petersburg, Florida

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