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Jack Kerouac

            World War II marked a wide dividing line between the old and the new in American society and the nation's literature"(The World Book Encyclopedia 427) . When world War II ended there was a pent up desire that had been postponed due to the war. Post war America brought about a time when it seemed that every young man was doing the same thing, getting a job, settling down and starting a family. America was becoming a nation of consumers. One group that was against conforming to this dull American lifestyle was referred to as "Beatniks". "The Beats or Beatniks condemned 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 pressures but still hasn't realized what it is exactly he wants to do. He is a man who has very little direction and is very much lost in the world as he knows it. Kerouac seems to be constantly trying to escape. In examining the novel one might wonder what is Kerouac escaping and by what means does he do so? Kerouac used two means of escape through out the novel and through out his life. His first means of escape was his constant travel. He traveled from east to west, New York to San Francisco and stopped everywhere in between. He made this trip over and over, constantly on the road. The simple title of the novel exemplifies Kerouac's ongoing need to travel. When he and his friends got tried of traveling east to west they traveled north to south, driving all the way down to Mexico City. His travels gave him the opportunity to be an outsider with no worries. He was able to witness and observe all that there was to offer throughout the country.


Essays Related to Jack Kerouac

1. "Jack Kerouac"

... he quit school and began traveling by ship to work his position as a merchant seaman. He did well in English class; receiving superior grades in the study of Shakespeare. Jack Kerouac created and lived the Beat Generation in the 1950's. He had several friends whom also participated in the group such as Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs, which ... of drugs and alcohol. "His loosely structured autobiographical works reflected a peripatetic life, with warm but stormy relationships, and a deep social disillusionment, assuaged by drugs, alcohol, mysticism, and biting humo...

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

2. One the Road by Jack Kerouac

... moment of living with the spontaneous act of writing which is not a common thing for all the authors. Effectively, in the book untitled The spontaneous poetics of Jack Kerouac, the author Regina Weinreich says that: "Kerouac's writing is an attempt to discover form not to imitate it and to discover experience in the act of writing about it, as if the language of ... alia new: a spontaneous and free flowing form that seem to mirror the very concepts of the beat philosophy, "improvisational and not restricted by standard grammatical and stylistic rules " (Atkinson 15). Jack Kerouac's writ...

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

3. Jack London Sea Wolf

... novel THE IRON HEEL (1908). JOHN BARLEYCORN, which describes the London's drinking bouts, connects him with such authors as Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac. On the other hand, London's views about the superiority of white people and that only the strongest deserve to survive have placed him among the ultra- ... and Nietzsche. In his later years London was interested in the work of Carl Jung. His influence has been considerable on such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, and Robert Ruark. As for "The Sea Wolf", none of this author's stories of wild out-of-door life has ever equa...

  • Word Count: 2465
  • Approx Pages: 10
  • Grade Level: High School

4. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

On The Road by Jack Kerouac 1957 Sal Paradise, the narrator of the story, is miserable and fed up with his mundane life when he meets a young man named Dean Moriarty during the winter of 1947. Dean is wild, irresponsible, and newly married to a girl named Marylou. Before long, Marylou and Dean sp...

  • Word Count: 757
  • Approx Pages: 3
  • Grade Level: High School

5. The Thing about the Beats

... it was written until now is the modern classic On the Road, the second novel of one of the most controversial writers of his time Jack Kerouac. The book is considered the first work of the Beat Generation, the name that was given to his small group of friends, that were ... "....and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingerprints barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear" (Kerouac, 176). The setting contributes in an important way, meticulously describing countryside after countryside he goes through, giving the reader clear images of ...

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

6. A Reflection of Sur

... of life itself. The book concludes with "Sea," the poem I mentioned that supposedly captures the sounds and words of the Pacific Ocean. Jack Kerouac Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Kerouac, a French-Canadian on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts. Youngest of three children, heartbroken when his brother died at the age ... started sailing with the Merchant Marine. While he wasn't sailing, he was hanging out with a crowd his parents didn't exactly approve of. Jack already began writing a novel; about the torments he suffered trying to balance his wild city life and his old-world fa...

  • Word Count: 1449
  • Approx Pages: 6
  • Grade Level: High School

7. Allen Ginsberg

... Beats were a group of artists and writers who rejected the martialism and consumerism of the age. The initial pioneers of the movement were Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs. The phrase "Beat Generation" was invented by Jack Kerouac in a 1948 conversation with John Clellon Holmes. (Schumacher 173-188) This group of artists were centered around Columbia University in New York City ... and would go 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...

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

8. THE BOP BEAT

... a slightly unbalanced relationship, Beat writers often molded their poetics and style after the playing of such jazz music. "Jazz writers," such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, upheld their poetic ideals to the techniques of jazz musicians, such as rhythm, improvisation, and call and response. The structure ... ). Ginsberg is said "to be a gifted public reader and has read some of his poems to jazz accompaniment, as have Whalen and Kerouac" (Benets 3). Although society now provides technological means of making audio records or preserving literature, the ultimate reinforcement of the ...

  • Word Count: 2473
  • Approx Pages: 10

9. A Look at the Beat Generation

... 's the little moments of perfection that become one's focus. No other Beat poet understood that concept as well as Jack Kerouac. "Jack Kerouac single handedly created the beat generation. Although Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs Brought their separate and cumulative madness to the beat generation ... that existence was reduced to its pure and uncontrived elements. A far cry from the outwardly prosperous, but inwardly hollow and commercial suburban life. Kerouac was a Roman Catholic with a strong fascination with Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies. He melded that ...

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

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