... "beat generation", as it came to be known. The beat generation had many influential contributors, but it can be argued that no other author, artist or individual's work better represented the philosophy of the "beats" than Jack Kerouac and his seminal work "On the Road." Kerouac is amongst the other authors from the beat generation sharing a similar life vision: "Those for whom the fog of war had lifted, and those who ... had rejected the suburbs, a steady job, and a two-car garage", explains Jay Atkinson" (12). Those authors ... ...

• Word Count: 1776
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography

... middle class American life as morally bankrupt. They praised individualism as the highest human goal"(The World Book Encyclopedia 428). This perspective was present in poetry and literature through out the beat movement. One of the most important works produced during the beat movement was Jack Kerouac's On The Road. In the novel Jack Kerouac's alter ego Sal Paradise represents the American man who realizes he doesn't want to conform to societies ... of escape was his constant travel. He traveled from east to west, New York to San Francisco and stopped everywhere in between. He made thi...

• Word Count: 1014
• Approx Pages: 4
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... and new accomplishments. "He quit school to become a merchant seaman and traveled to the North Atlantic, Greenland, and England- (Jack Kerouac: Dharma). During this time of travel, Kerouac wrote constantly. In 1951, he wrote On the Road, which was finally published in 1957. On the Road was a stylistic breakthrough for Kerouac who had developed a theory of writing he called, spontaneous prose. "He defined that ... that may or may not rhyme, leading to enlightenment-(Pop! The Jack). This new discovery was the beginning of numerous accomplishments. Kerouac's On the Road was a hit all over A...

• Word Count: 1445
• Approx Pages: 6
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... New Orleans, San Francisco and even the Mexican road. What relevance does the title have and what is its significance to the story? At the beginning of the story we find out the most specific information about the novel's title On the Road: "I got ready to travel West for the very first time" (Kerouac, 6). This is because from this point on, the rest of the story is about his experiences on the road across America. There is a great significance ... of the title of the story, for the whole book is about Sal Paradise ... ...

• Word Count: 3797
• Approx Pages: 15
• Grade Level: High School

... a distinctive style, part severe simplicity, part hep-cat jargon, part baroque. (Adams 2)" Phoebe Lou Adams, a columnist for The Atlantic Monthly, stated this about Jack Kerouac's book On the Road. Kerouac did indeed have a distinctive style of writing, because it was in the format of a journal. He uses repetition, remarkable consistency, and stuck to an important theme, a man trying to find himself in society. ... Adams agrees with these statements and her review is relevant to someone who is interested in reading the great book On the Road. "The inability of a ... reach a sort of hap...

• Word Count: 606
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: High School

... what was soon to be called, "the Beat Generation". He wrote the book On the Road in three weeks although it took him seven years of spontaneous traveling to acquire its accounts. His wandering way of life was so rebellious of the times that his work was not praised until decades later. In the book On the Road, Kerouac plays an unsettling, insightful traveler on his own personal endeavor to search for ... an answer. To what question only Kerouac knows. His ... travels begin in Paterson, NJ, and over the course of seven years, never returning home, he manages to ... ...

• Word Count: 506
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: High School

... a poetic one is acute. Clark Coolidge, a drummer and poet, inquires after the relationship, of language and "wordless shapes of time" (Feinstein 255). Music happens between certain constrictions, those of beat and count. Clearly, poetry behaves in a similar manner. Dean Moriarty, Neal Cassady's persona in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, stresses that "we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know ... that everything is really FINE" (Road 208). Time is not oppressive if one knows how to use it effectively, which jazz musicians and Beat poets knew how ... In playing music, this takes on the ...

• Word Count: 2473
• Approx Pages: 10

... trade in for being cooped up in a split level tract house with only the companionship of a vacuum cleaner and a screaming five year old. To the Beats the only solution to a life of domestic stagnation was to pack up and let life lead you down one winding road after another. There was a certain comfort in the unknown. Ambiguity turned survival into a triviality, while one could find ... the deepest meaning in chance and whimsy. When mere existence doesn't seem to be guaranteed it's the little moments of perfection that become one's focus. No other Beat poet understood that concept as well...

• Word Count: 1025
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: High School

... and context of "Times Square" in the title is very ironic: he is physically standing on Times Square, yet dreaming, and having ethereal thoughts of the same location in his mind-the Times Square of a different era. Moreover, he is dreaming of an idea and concept-what Times Square represents to him-more than the stones in the middle of the road. The obvious theme of this particular poem ... own writing. In this instance, music and writing are synonymous to art. Just as the trumpeter stands "at dawn" and "blow[s] a silver chorus to the buildings" so could Ginsberg invisibly shout his pros...

• Word Count: 901
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: High School

... poets, writers, thinkers, and philosophers who emerged on the hip scene in the 1940s and ballooned into the San Francisco Renaissance and beyond. It describes how even though the original beats were few in number, many "movements" in literary history often happened when a cluster of a few writers, tied together by time more than space, uncovered a new path or road of writing style and content. This is ... what the beats did: they went against mainstream, traditional writing, but not because they were rebellious. They simply developed a new way of writing, a "New Vision" while in search ...

• Word Count: 974
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: High School

... trade in for being cooped up in a split level tract house with only the companionship of a vacuum cleaner and a screaming five year old. To the Beats the only solution to a life of domestic stagnation was to pack up and let life lead you down one winding road after another. There was a certain comfort in the unknown. Ambiguity turned survival into a triviality, while one could find ... the deepest meaning in chance and whimsy. When mere existence doesn't seem to be guaranteed it's the little moments of perfection that become one's focus. No other Beat poet understood that concept as well...

• Word Count: 1018
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: High School

... on to create the works that would define a generation. Of these works, two would reach the greatest commercial success and epitomize the works of the beats: On the Road by Jack Kerouac and Howl by Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac's piece, a semi-autobiographical tale, depicting the travels and interactions of Kerouac and his friends. The book retells of the journeys of the group across the ... country for a period of three years. It includes anecdote about buses and hitchhiking which were all parallels of Kerouac's experiences. From the constant movement of an array of colorful characters, shifti...

• Word Count: 4095
• Approx Pages: 16
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... traveled all over China, Tibet, and Mongolia really appealed to Snyder. One day Snyder said to Kerouac "real Buddhists are able to walk around the countryside (Snyder on Kerouac)-. Kerouac agreed and they went on one final trip of the season out into the mountains. A great amount of emphasis was put on Eastern religions and thought by Snyder and his peers. In his essay "What Poetry Did in China ... idea of legalizing hitch-hiking in "Four Changes-, suggesting that there be hitch-hiking stations on the sides of highways to limit the number of cars on the road, a similar idea to our curre...

• Word Count: 2488
• Approx Pages: 10
• Grade Level: High School

... made a beautiful work of art. It takes courage and a great deal of confidence to write a book that is surely to be the subject of a great deal of criticism. Jack Kerouac's book, On The Road, raised many eyebrows. Although it appealed to a great number of people, it also angered many other people. This story tells about a young man named Sal that encounters many different types ... of people as he travels back and forth across the United States. His life is spent on the road and that's where he is at peace. He ... lives of Sal and his friends on the road made On The Road the subject of ...

• Word Count: 1812
• Approx Pages: 7
• Grade Level: High School