Women figure prominently in Kerouac’s work, from novels explicitly about women he had encountered in his life (Maggie Cassidy and Tristessa), to short stories like “Good Blonde,” to the lengthy, often lyrical passages about women in The Subterraneans and On the Road. This chapter explores Kerouac’s controversial representations of women, which are often sexist, misogynist, essentialist, racist. Women in Kerouac’s works, even at their most indelible and dramatic, are, as the Beat writer Joyce Johnson termed them, “minor characters”; they catalyze or support action, struggle for recognition, then disappear from the story. Even when the female characters are presumptively protagonists, as in Maggie Cassidy or Tristessa or “Good Blonde,” they are still not much more than objects of narrative delectation or vehicles for emotional expression.

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.

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.