This chapter assesses Kerouac’s literary career from the perspective of the profession of authorship. Despite his bohemian reputation, Kerouac was a diligent professional writer who engaged publishers directly and via literary agents in order to actively manage his professional career. Kerouac’s goal was to convince publishers and thus the reading public of the significance of his signature artistic style, which he called “Spontaneous Prose.” Viking Press was not interested in his Spontaneous Prose books as viable sellers, and his income and reputation declined in proportion with his insistence on producing books in this style. Despite the belief held by many Kerouac fans today that he was a literary saint who disavowed money and materialism, in fact he both wanted to make money and earn literary respect based on his artistic merits. He was not a commercial writer per se, since he sacrificed publication for the integrity of his art, but he did want the publishing industry to see the inherent value in his Spontaneous Prose books.

If so much of American poetry from the early twentieth century onward looks to revitalize the genre’s forms and conventions by mining from the national vernacular, then jazz has been both a model for that process and a source of expressive inspiration. This essay looks at the range of American poetic responses to jazz, from the early modernist efforts of poets such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Vachel Lindsay, to more contemporary figures like Nathaniel Mackey, Morgan Parker, and Kevin Young. In observing the long shadow that the music has cast on poetic experimentation, this survey also observes variations in identity and perspective and maps the reciprocal relationship between different jazz styles and modern poetics, including the tension between song lyrics and lyric poetry. Ultimately, this essay reveals through a wealth of examples the comprehensive heterogeneity of jazz poetry despite these writers’ shared starting points.

While the term “bohemian” has fallen out of favor, the desire to explore alternative lifestyles that challenge mainstream social expectations remains. Focusing mainly on the Beat Generation writers but including a broad range of other bohemian groups both past and present, this chapter explores the reasons for bohemia’s demise, makes an honest assessment of its shortcomings, and attempts to redeem what is worthwhile from the concept. Despite its paradoxes and problems, there are good reasons to retain a bohemian ideal that brings the contradictions in everyday life into sharper focus, even if the future of bohemia might not be urban. At its best, the bohemian desire to live a fuller life outside society’s margins functions as a utopian gesture that challenges our media-obsessed culture with a focus on the personal and inner-directed. In such a world, bohemia is as difficult to enact as it is necessary for those who want to define life and its possibilities for themselves.

My third chapter investigates the use of tape recording as a mode of composition for late-modernists Jack Kerouac (Visions of Cody) and William S. Burroughs (The Ticket That Exploded). For Kerouac, the impulse was toward improvisatory transcription, but for Burroughs, tape was an integral part of his notorious “cut-up method.” I focus on the emergence of commercially available tape recording technologies in the 1950s and 1960s, which enabled amateurs to record as well as edit, loop, and manipulate recordings in other imaginative ways. In both novels that I explore, tapes play a key role within the plot; but they were also employed in the construction of the texts. As friends and collaborators with largely different approaches to tape, Kerouac and Burroughs demonstrate how the transformation of agency from consumer to producer of recordings shifted the ways writers imagined their literary projects.

This chapter explains how the Beat sensibility emerged from the New York underground in the mid- to late 1940s.