On the Road

The legendary 1951 scroll draft of On the Road, published word for word as Kerouac originally composed it. Typed out as one long, single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing paper that he later taped together to form a 120 foot scroll, this document is among the most significant, celebrated, and provocative artifacts in contemporary American literary history.

This resource contains a plot summary, themes, critical overview, and historical overview of the time period of "On the Road".

Entries in this encyclopedia include brief introductions to the work, discussions of the work's historical setting, an overview of the events of the time that the work was written, and the work in focus.

Look for the chapter "Alternative Routes along the Road: Kerouac and the Multifaceted American Dream".

This series of critical interpretations of literature contains critical biographies, notes on the contributing critics, themes, and chronologies of the authors' lives.

Through careful analysis of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Omar Swartz argues that Kerouac's influence on American society is largely rhetorical. Kerouac's significance as a cultural icon can be best understood, Swartz asserts, in terms of traditional rhetorical practices and principles. To Swartz, Kerouac is a rhetor who symbolically reconstructs his world and offers arguments and encouragements for others to follow. Swartz proposes that On the Road constitutes a rhetorical vision, a reality-defining discourse suggesting alternative possibilities for growth and change. Swartz asserts that the reader of Kerouac's On the Road becomes capable of responding to the larger, confusing culture in a strategic manner. Kerouac's rhetorical vision of an alternative social and cultural reality contributes to the identity of localized cultures within the United States.

The ten essays in this groundbreaking compilation cover a broad range of topics, employing a variety of approaches, including theoretical interpretations and textual and comparative analysis, to investigate such issues as race, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as the novel's historical and literary contexts.

Covers American authors from many periods and genres, building a broad understanding of the various contexts - from the biographical to the literary to the historical - in which literature can be viewed.

Now a classic, Kerouac’s Crooked Road was one of the first critical works on the legendary Beat writer to analyze his work as serious literary art, placing it in the broader American literary tradition with canonical writers like Herman Melville and Mark Twain. Author Tim Hunt explores Kerouac’s creative process and puts his work in conversation with classic American literature and with critical theory.

In 1969 Jack Kerouac died a premature death. While his legendary lifestyle and unique creative talent made him a hero in his lifetime, his literary influence has grown steadily since. With Memory Babe (a childhood nickname honoring Kerouac's feats of memory), Gerald Nicosia gives us a complete biography of Jack Kerouac--an honest, discriminating and, above all, compassionate assessment. This edition is enhanced by many rare photographs never before published.

Understanding Jack Kerouac introduces a new generation of readers to what Matt Theado calls Kerouac's unwieldy accretion of published work - fiction, poetry, nonfiction, selected letters, religious writing and true-story novels. Presenting this Beat Generation icon as a writer rather than as a social rebel or media celebrity, Theado asks why Kerouac's reputation has outlived disparaging beatnik associations. He takes a book-by-book approach to the sometimes confusing canon and develops a framework for understanding Kerouac's thematic concerns, writing techniques and artistic evolution.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Beat Generation writers revolutionized American literature with their iconoclastic approach to language and their angry assault on the conformity and conservatism of postwar society. This volume offers a concise overview of the social, cultural, and aesthetic sensibilities of the Beats, bringing out the similarities that connected them and also the many differences that made them a loosely knit collective rather than an organized movement.