Kerouac, Jack (Vol. 3) - Kerouac, Jack 1922–1969
Kerouac, Jack 1922–1969
An American Beat novelist, Kerouac advocated a method of spontaneous writing allegedly derived from James Joyce. Kerouac was also a student of Zen. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.; obituary, Vols. 25-28.)
Such Zen as Kerouac picked up makes him realize, it seems, the cosmic importance of the primal elements of life: not food, clothing, shelter, sex (here [in The Dharma Bums] Kerouac's alter ego Ray Smith is less trammelled than the Zen saint, Japhy) … but a melodious phrase, a woodland bird, a rock formation, a mountain silence. Call him anti-social, infantilely regressive, a lily of the field, a sluggard grasshopper … Kerouac, with his Thoreau and Whitman genes tingling in his protoplasm, brings back in transfigured form the very thing he is taught to adjure, the very thing conventional writers have exploited beyond measure: the world of physical sensation, of touchable and seeable...
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