Word: kerouac
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...books about college life suffused with sophomoric philosophizing and romantic despair. Then came J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, and a spate of imitative books about troubling and precocious children. Since the late '50s and Jack Kerouac's On the Road, the picaresque adventures of rebellious youth seeking wisdom through forbidden experience have been the dominant theme. Now, perhaps, William Harrison's superb second novel-about four contemporary graduate students and their suicide pact-may bring the literary wheel full circle to the campus scene...
Died. Jack Kerouac, 47, novelist and spiritual father of the Beat Generation (see THE NATION...
...Jack Kerouac's "barbaric yawp" broke into the American consciousness in the middle years of Eisenhower. At roughly the same time, Marlon Brando, adenoidal and inarticulately glowering, careered through adolescent daydreams astride a Harley-Davidson. From the perspective of the late '60s, the old rebellions and spontaneities seem as touchingly quaint as the shock they elicited at the time. Kerouac's vision was compounded of Buddhism, booze (of all bourgeois things) and a chaotic lowlife that he worked into exuberant underground literature. When he wrote of casual sex or marijuana, they were still exotic and forbidden fruits...
...shaman of the Beat Generation, Kerouac was a forebear of today's hippie and radical counterculture. But he would not or could not translate himself into the '60s. A little before he died last week at 47, Kerouac was muttering at both straight society and the rebellious young, the military-industrial complex and the Viet Cong. "You can't fight city hall," he wrote. "It keeps changing its name." It would be too easy to believe that all of today's radical young will slip into cantankerous conservatism. But some undoubtedly will. It may be that...
According to his friends, Kerouac was almost never tired and always hopeful. No one went to visit him in his time; we were embarrassed by our writing teachers who told us that Kerouac's prose was bad. It isn't. Now he's dead; but he was a good man, and the ideas for which he was mocked, that "bad prose" which liberated so many, are still good. We should say a prayer for him: God give us strength to be as alive as Kerouac was. Send us more to help burn away the bullshit...