Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose and the Post-War Avant-Garde Essay

Kerouacs ad-lib Prose and the Post-War Avant-Garde My title comes from one of Kerouacs own essays, Aftermath The philosophical system of the reprimand Generation, which he published in Esquire in March 1958. In it, he identifies the Beats as subterranean heroes whod finally glowering from the freedom machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of insight, experiencing the derangement of the senses, talk of the town strange, being poor and glad, prophesying a new style for American tillage, a new style (we thought) completely free from European influences (unlike the Lost Generation), a new incantation. (Kerouac, Aftermath 47) Kerouacs new style for American culture was the spontaneous prose method he developed in 1952, a dazzle fusion of the colloquial and the literary that utilized stylistic strategies drawn from movies, humorous strips, pulp fiction, and jazz. But, fifty years on, Kerouacs stylistic brilliance has dumb not been fully recognized. H is reputation still rests, unfortunately, on his two closely commercial novels, On the alley and The Dharma Bums. Neither of these novels is spontaneous prose. One random variable of On the Road was, indeed, written in a three workweek period on a 100 foot scroll of teletype paper, scarce Kerouac developed spontaneous prose after this famous scroll experiment furthermore, the strain of On the Road that was finally published in 1957 had been significantly revise several more times in the intervening years (Hunt 1). As Kerouac said in a 1968 interview, In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with On the Road and The Dharma Bums, I had no power to stand by my style for mitigate or worse. When Malcolm Cowley made endless revisions... ...ris Review. recent York The Modern Library, 1999. ---. Selected Letters, 1940-1956. Ed. Ann Charters. refreshed York Penguin Books, 1996. --- Selected Letters, 1957-1969. Ed. Ann Charters. crude York Penguin Books, 1996. Landau, Ellen. Jackson Pollock . New York Abrams, 1989. MacAdams, Lewis. Birth of the Cool Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant-Garde. New York The Free Press, 2001. Mackey, Nathaniel. Other From Noun to Verb. The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. Ed. R.G. OMeally. New York Columbia University Press, 1998. Miles, Barry. Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats A Portrait. New York atomic number 1 Holt, 1998. Rosenthal, David. Hard Bop Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965. New York Oxford University Press, 1992. Stone, Robert. American Dreamers Melville and Kerouac. Beat Down to Your Soul. Ed. Ann Charters. New York Penguin, 2001.