This chapter begins by scrutinizing The Dharma Bums through the lens of the Romantic/Transcendentalist models that inspired the novel’s re-enchantment of nonhuman material creation. A second part turns to Kerouac’s haiku and The Scripture of the Golden Eternity to show how the concept of Buddhist “Emptiness” considerably enriches his Romantic/Transcendentalist sense of “field-being.” This section argues that the embeddedness of the human mind in the nonhuman combined with a serene acceptance of the latter’s elusiveness actually constitutes one of Kerouac’s important, if paradoxical, contributions to an understanding of the web of environmental continuities. By contrast, the third part moves from Kerouac’s ecospiritual holism to his deep-seated ecophobia: as found in “Desolation Journal,” Desolation Angels, and “Desolation Blues.” A fourth anddiscusses how, despite his environmental angst, Kerouac nevertheless experiments considerably at the level of ecopoetics, probing into a wildness of form that compensates, on the one hand, for the fear that untamed nature instills in his fiction and poetry, and on the other, for the limited presence of any wilderness in his city-inspired texts.

Anger and frustration over Indigenous ethnic identity fraud have reached fever pitch across social and official media, within cultural and political institutions, and in Indigenous communities. It seems a day doesn’t pass without new revelations of people who have lied about and capitalized on Indigenous identity. Joy Harjo decried such “identity crimes,” saying that “Some claim identity by tenuous family story and some are perpetrating outright fraud.” These arguments go beyond simply outing individuals; increasingly, they call for publishers, universities, and other institutions to do a better job of verifying Indian identity claims. In doing so, however, many are pulling toward a problematic benchmark: enrollment in a federally recognized tribe. I respond to this with a reading of two urban intertribal newspapers – Los Angeles’ Talking Leaf and Boston’s The Circle – published before many tribes achieved their federal recognition. For Native nations that have experienced ethnocide, state detribalization, and rejection of their federal recognition claims, such newspapers have helped tribal members find each other, remember their histories and collectively imagine their futures

This chapter shows how part of Kerouac’s motivations for his literary experiments was to bring English closer to himself and at the same time to move it away from the monolingualism that dominated US literature and culture. He aimed to create a prose that in its syntax, vocabulary, and rhythms was open to foreignness, which many critics and scholars both then and now have taken for simply bad writing. Though French was his starting point, he wanted to bring American English closer to all languages. Correlatively, in his fiction he depicts peoples of a variety of ethnic and linguistic heritages. In On the Road, the road is Sal Paradise’s means to encounter these different populations and their languages, the place where they all encounter each other. In his other novels, Kerouac paints tenderly detailed pictures of the Franco-American population of Lowell, Massachusetts that he hailed from, as well as towns and cities in places such as France and North Africa. This chapter shows that a major impulse of his writing is to imagine a utopia of global cultural and convergence and to contribute to ushering it into existence.

American writing midwifed the white–nonwhite binary that continues to shape formulations of racial difference in the United States. In surveying the emergence of whiteness in American literature, it becomes evident that the literary record was key to imagining this constructed racial category and making it synonymous with Americanness. Through its portraits of English settlement, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the creation of a slave-for-life caste, and the expansion of national boundaries as divine destiny, American literature cemented an ideological whiteness that defined a single racial group as the inheritors of American rights and privileges and further guaranteed a social stratification that would engender continued racial hauntings.

This chapter examines how cheap, handy, and accessible print formats facilitated the growth and development of American genre writing throughout the twentieth century. From horror stories to science fiction, popular genres took root in pulpwood magazines targeting working-class male readers who lived in industrialized areas. Paperback books became the primary format by which genre writing was marketed to a mass readership. Whether in magazine or book form, the appeal of pulp fiction may be attributed to the serial plots and sensationalized storytelling that came along with ephemeral print media. But it also may be attributed to their masculinist perspectives and racial and ethnic stereotyping narrative strategies that reinforced the prejudices of its presumed readership of white men. The chapter tracks the representation of anti-Asian and anti-Black sentiment in pulp fiction from the early twentieth century to the Black Power era. It explains how such sentiment reflected nativist and imperialist ideologies of difference, and it ends with a consideration of how writers of color have sought to diversify popular genres by writing against the pulp traditions they have inherited.

This chapter explains why the topic of Mexican American culture became especially urgent during the 1960s and 1970s, and shows why this emphasis on culture came under question during the 1980s. Arellano describes how the Chicano literary intervention was crucial for exposing reductive caricatures by providing more nuanced characterizations of Mexican Americans. This focus on nuanced characterization, however, ultimately risked obfuscating the damaging effects of class struggle. Referencing the competing visions of Tomás Rivera and Richard Rodriguez, concerning the value of culture, Arellano analyzes literary case studies by José Antonio Villarreal and Arturo Islas, showing how their emphasis on a shared ethnic identity occluded class inequality. Arellano concludes by analyzing Rolando Hinojosa’s novel We Happy Few, which reconsiders the legacy of Chicano activism, demonstrating how Hinojosa disarticulates the novel’s meaning from cultural unity and reconnects it to the needs of workers. The novel thus highlights a view of literature that takes Mexican American humanity as a given and directs readers’ critical attention toward the problems that arise from a society organized by class

Jack Kerouac is among the most important and influential writers to emerge from mid-twentieth- century America. Father of the Beat literary movement, Kerouac’s most famous novel, On the Road, was known as the bible of this generation, and inspired untold people to question the rigid social and cultural expectations of 1950s America. And yet despite its undeniable influence, On the Road is only a small piece of Kerouac’s literary achievement, as more than forty other books by him have been published. The centerpiece to this work is Kerouac’s multi-volume Duluoz Legend, named for his fictional alter-ego, Jack Duluoz, and comprising numerous books written over decades that together tell the story of Duluoz’s life and times. This Companion offers fresh perspectives on Kerouac’s multifaceted body of work, ranging from detailed analyses of his most significant books to wide-angle perspectives that place Kerouac in key literary, theoretical, and cultural contexts.

This chapter examines Kerouac’s later novels such as Big Sur, Satori in Paris, Desolation Angels, and Vanity of Duluoz, showing how he developed a “late style” that was a response to the way his image and writing were commodified by popular and literary culture. These late novels portray the author-narrator as out of step with a culture that has passed him by, as Kerouac suggests the ways his fame as the so-called “King of the Beatniks” led to both his increasing alcoholism, and to new ways of looking at himself in his writing.

This chapter focuses on Kerouac’s epic “Duluoz Legend,” a series of autobiographical books that form the core of his oeuvre. These books include seminal works such as On the Road, Visions of Cody, and The Dharma Bums, and although such books can be read outside the context of the Duluoz Legend, Kerouac saw them as pieces of “one enormous comedy.” This chapter focuses on the Duluoz Legend as a whole, exploring: 1) how the idea of writing a series of autobiographical books “on the run” occurred to Kerouac; 2) how the books comprising the Legend are related; 3) the different literary models for the Legend, with particular attention to the example of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; 5) the various prose styles in the Legend; and 6) how to read the Legend as a record of both Kerouac’s evolving consciousness and the events of his life.

This chapter explores Kerouac’s rich understanding of literary history as manifested in his Duluoz Legend, focusing in particular on two mechanisms by which this understanding turns up in his work. The first mechanism was his deep desire to seek and speak the truth, as he wrestled with his need to lead a godly life, a product of his Catholic upbringing, while simultaneously recognizing the almost requisite demand that a great novelist experience the darkness of the human soul. The second is the confession, which was not the legal confession of a court room or the spiritual confession of the church, but the broader truth of any human being who follows a path to forgiveness and wholeness by repeatedly purging themselves of sin, guilt, or embarrassment. Kerouac consistently worked truth and confession together – often to the dismay of some readers – twinning and twining them as he grappled with his spiritual and bodily identity as an American writer living in two conflicting Americas, the “the essential and everlasting America” of the ethereal beauty and mysticism, and the post–World War II triumphalist America of materialism and militarization.

This chapter explores Kerouac’s poetic output, arguing that he should be considered an important twentieth-century poet and poetic innovator. In particular, this chapter explores Kerouac’s book-length poetic masterwork, Mexico City Blues, and his development of an American form of haiku, as found in Book of Haikus and elsewhere. The poetic forms of Mexico City Blues and Book of Haikus are very different, and yet taken together, they demonstrate Kerouac’s range as a poet. With these major works as its focus, this chapter aims to reassess Kerouac’s poetry by reading its formal and thematic preoccupations in terms of the advent of the mid-century “New American Poetry,” which rebuked the norms of the reigning poetic establishment centered in universities and their associated anthologies and quarterlies.

This chapter focuses on Kerouac’s last major novel, Vanity of Duluoz in the context of the 1960s. This novel was composed under fraught conditions as Kerouac labored under intense financial pressure to earn money to pay for his mother’s debilitating illnesses. Not only was it a struggle for Kerouac to complete it, the novel also powerfully documents Kerouac’s struggle with reconciling his traditional, “conservative” upbringing with the nascent “Beat” rebellious energies – born in the forties and continuing into the sixties – a conflict which this chapter explores.

The usual view of Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose is that it is a matter of writing fast without reflection, and the story of Kerouac drafting On the Road in April 1951 by typing/composing the whole novel onto a roll of paper in a three-week marathon presumably legitimizes this view. However, this chapter argues that we should understand Spontaneous Prose as a reinvention of textuality rather than simply a matter of writing fast and without reflection, which in turn allows us to understand Kerouac’s responsiveness to modern media (film and analogue recording in particular) to the paradigm of conventional print textuality, bringing into view his development of what might be termed “post-print textuality” in even his seemingly more conventionally written novels. Ultimately, this chapter shows that Kerouac’s experiments with textuality rewrote the standards by which “good literature” in the postwar era was measured.

An introduction to the study of race in American literature.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel, was a tremendous success and the source of intense polemic when it first appeared in 1852. Since then, the novel has never entirely disappeared from the scene and has remained the locus of heated discussion on the representation of race and on race relations in the United States. This chapter will attempt to trace the role Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Stowe’s novel, but also its rewritings, tie-ins, and adaptations – has played in discussions of race in the United States since the 1850s. The first part will investigate the inception of the novel, its strategies, publishing circumstances, and immediate reception. The second part will focus on the afterlife of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, both in terms of scholarly commentary and popular appropriations.