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

Kerouacs Spontaneous Prose and the Post-War Avant-Garde My title of respect comes from one of Kerouacs own essays, viewing The Philosophy of the Beat Generation, which he published in Esquire in March 1958. In it, he identifies the defeat as subterranean heroes whod finally turned from the freedom mould of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of insight, experiencing the derangement of the senses, talking strange, being pitiable and glad, prophesying a new agency for American culture, 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 unbidden prose rule he developed in 1952, a dazzling fusion of the conversational and the literary that utilized stylistic strategies drawn from movies, comic strips, pulp fiction, and jazz. But, cubic decimetre years on, Kerouacs stylistic brilliance has still not been in full recognize d. His reputation still rests, unfortunately, on his two most commercial novels, On the way and The Dharma Bums. Neither of these novels is spontaneous prose. One version of On the driveway was, indeed, written in a three week period on a 100 foot scroll of teletype paper, but Kerouac developed spontaneous prose after this famous scroll experiment further more than, the version of On the Road that was finally published in 1957 had been significantly revised 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 better or worse. When Malcolm Cowley make endless revisions... ...ris Review. naked York The Modern Library, 1999. ---. Selected Letters, 1940-1956. Ed. Ann Charters. New York Penguin Books, 1996. --- Selected Letters, 1957-1969. Ed. Ann Charters. New York Penguin Books, 1996. Landau, Ellen. diddlyshitson pollack . New York Abra ms, 1989. MacAdams, Lewis. Birth of the Cool Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant-Garde. New York The Free Press, 2001. Mackey, Nathaniel. opposite 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 Henry Holt, 1998. Rosenthal, David. Hard lie with 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.