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.

This chapter examines a central motif that runs throughout Kerouac’s corpus – the desire to capture the events of the past in a literary form that lends them affective force in the present. In novels like Doctor Sax, among many others, Kerouac relied on Spontaneous Prose to infuse the earlier occurrences of his life with renewed vigor and immediacy, resulting in works that challenge the more staid narrative styles of memoir or autobiography. At his best, Kerouac was able to make the past “come alive” again in the present and this sort of intensity has been one of the major reasons for the interest in his work as well as for its longevity. But despite this success, Kerouac’s attempts at writing memory are continually subject to intrusion, indecision, and uncertainty. This chapter shows that Kerouac’s attempts to record memory in a form that retains intensity across time provide insight not only into his literary method, but allow us to reconsider more generally how the events of the past can be usefully brought into the present, and the stakes involved in doing so.