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.

In 1959, literary critic Warren Tallman published a landmark study of Kerouac’s spontaneous method that focused on The Subterraneans, a novel Kerouac wrote over the course of just three days in 1953. This chapter builds on Tallman’s work (and other subsequent scholarship) to show how Kerouac adopted the use of spontaneity from what he understood to be a jazz aesthetic, purposively repudiating the reigning New Critical norms that dictated “good” fiction must exhibit certain kinds of “unity” and “selectivity” of expression. This chapter therefore takes The Subterraneans as a concentrated case study in how Kerouac composes, rehearses and constructs a Spontaneous Prose text.

Kerouac referred to the Black American as “the essential American” and “the salvation of America,” phrases that, while never adequately explored in Kerouac’s writing, signal at least recognition of the centrality of Black Americans and Black American culture to the broader American society. This chapter explores how consumption of Black culture and Blackness as a catalytic theme weaves throughout Kerouac’s work and is key to his broader aesthetic philosophy. However, this chapter argues that his often superficial readings ignore the reality of Black constraint, subsequently rendering Black life discrepant with the lived experience of Blackness in America. Problematically, his longing is ultimately predicated on Black silence and evasion of Black interiority, and any identification with Blacks is transitory and does not ameliorate his uses of Blackness.