Jack Kerouac and the literary imagination

"Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination" explores Kerouac's fiction, poetry, religious writing, private journals, and correspondence as literary texts revealing his aesthetic vision for American belle letters - one embracing the confessional, rhapsodic, sermonic, and comic.

The vision encompasses his fictional rewriting of his personal life, his life-long quest for spiritual enlightenment - both Christian and Buddhist - and his resolute belief in the blending of popular and academic cultural artifacts to create voices and forms that would speak of and to a new age.

The book focuses on his use of film, comic book characters, and jazz, as well as his indebtedness to texts as diverse as James Joyce's "Ulysses", St.

Teresa de Avila's "Prayers and Confessions", William Gibson's "The Shadow", "the Apocrypha", Gene Autry's "B-movie westerns", and Goethe's "Faust".