Erik Mortenson and Tomasz Sawczuk, editors. Rethinking Kerouac: Afterlives, Continuities, Reappraisals
Bloomsbury, 2025. Pp. 272. ISBN: 9798765105290
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1The 2022 centennial of Jack Kerouac’s birth offered the perfect moment to reckon anew with his complicated legacy. Few American authors are as beloved by readers yet so mistrusted by the academy. The early dismissal of On the Road as “anti-intellectual” cast a long shadow, and although Beat scholars have worked hard to secure his place, two specters still haunt his reputation: the devotional fervor of fans and persistent unease over his racial and gendered blind spots and political conservatism. For students and critics alike, his dated views demand attention. But can we reconcile his celebration of freedom and critique of conformity with his reactionary turn later in life, or with his troubling depictions of women and people of color?
2What gives Rethinking Kerouac its coherence is not an attempt to excuse or dismiss these tensions but to stage them productively. The essays share not only a set of themes but a formal method, one that marks a “neostructural” moment in Kerouac studies. They explore binaries—spontaneity vs. revision, fact vs. fiction, admiration vs. critique—without rushing to resolve them. In this framework, Kerouac’s writing itself becomes a mediating third term, resisting neat categorization and inviting politically attuned readings. The result is a reframing of Kerouac not as a static countercultural figure but as a dynamic site of inquiry who continually complicates the very oppositions through which we try to understand him.
3The first section, “Rethinking the Writing,” insists that to grasp Kerouac’s significance, we must encounter him in all his guises: novelist, poet, painter, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, and, in Deborah Geis’s terms, practitioner of “radical vulnerability.” Matt Theado opens by tracing the complex textual history of On the Road. Through drafts, including the legendary scroll version, revisions, and translations, he shows the novel as a fluid interplay of openness and craft. Aldon Nielsen turns to Kerouac’s poetry, arguing it deserves recognition alongside his prose. His reading of Mexico City Blues, especially the “Charlie Parker” choruses, highlights how Kerouac’s serial forms echo jazz improvisation and radio structures, while engaging questions of Black cultural influence and appropriation, a recurring theme in the collection.
4Frida Forsgren looks at Kerouac’s visual art, linking his paintings to Beat Art, the Bay Area Figurative movement, and Abstract Expressionism. She shows how he “sketched” with both words and paint, blending spontaneity, figuration, and spiritual themes. Brett Sigurdson explores Kerouac’s experiments with film, from “bookmovie” treatments to Pull My Daisy with Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank, revealing his struggle to reconcile film as both art and entertainment. Steven Belletto positions Kerouac as a writer who blurs fiction and nonfiction. Works like Lonesome Traveler convey a Buddhist-inflected fluidity of form and identity. Finally, Geis reconsiders Kerouac’s later work through the lens of “radical vulnerability,” which she finds a more generative mode than “confession.” In readings of Big Sur, Satori in Paris, and Vanity of Duluoz, she traces the interplay between vision and reality, emphasizing a writer intent on dismantling his own mythos.
5The second section, “Kerouac and the Social,” sharpens the volume’s neostructuralist edge, situating him along contested continuums of race, gender, sexuality, and cultural identity. This is where the collection’s most incisive essays appear, confronting social complexities without moving to either absolve or condemn. Pierre-Antoine Pellerin situates Visions of Cody within Cold War masculinity, highlighting its oscillation between queer desire and heteronormative ideals, while privileging rhetorical analysis over biographical revelation. John Whalen-Bridge reflects on teaching The Dharma Bums in Singapore, showing how students’ diverse perspectives can reshape engagement with the text and demonstrating the value of rereading Kerouac in global contexts.
6Kurt Hemmer offers a fearless reading of Kerouac’s controversial “blackface” novel Pic, exposing its primitivism and minstrelsy and analyzing how it reflects his struggle to confront both whiteness and otherness. Nancy M. Grace traces Kerouac’s political sensibilities through populist rhetoric, revealing tensions between individualism and solidarity and complicating a simple left-right alignment. Hassan Melehy places Kerouac within a global framework, showing how his French-Canadian heritage shaped his sensitivity to marginalized cultures. Drawing on Spengler’s concept of the fellahin and Goethe’s Faustian vision, he demonstrates how Kerouac positions his writing between rootedness and cosmopolitan wanderlust. Collectively, these essays depict Kerouac continually testing the social and political terrain that keeps his work vital.
7The final section, “Kerouac’s Influence and Legacy,” is perhaps the most innovative and farthest reaching, making a strong case for his continued relevance in the twenty-first century. Here, a music critic, an Americanist, an archivist, translators, and more reveal how his experimental forms ripple across disciplines. Peggy Pacini places On the Road in dialogue with Ross Goodwin’s AI-generated 1 the Road, suggesting that both projects push the limits of narrative technology. The “WordCar,” constantly spitting out fragments as it rolled across the country, becomes an uncanny update of Kerouac’s marathon typewriting sessions, prompting Pacini to consider speed, originality, and the pressures of late capitalism. Simon Warner traces Kerouac’s impact on Anglo-American popular music, contrasting his radical aesthetic influence with his increasingly conservative personal outlook.
8Ronna C. Johnson reclaims Kerouac as a quintessentially American writer, while attending to the multiplicities of the nation itself. She reads him against the grain of the now-dominant focus on his transnationalism, showing him navigating the fault lines of American exceptionalism and its critique. Michael Millner situates Kerouac at the crossroads of archive, scholarship, and the “public humanities.” Teaching in Lowell and curating centennial exhibits, he portrays the author as a bridge between fan devotion and academic inquiry. Public humanities projects, he argues, must keep racial and gender complexities at the forefront. Mortenson and Sawczuk close the volume with a roundtable of translators, highlighting the push and pull between cultural specificity and global resonance. By reflecting on Kerouac’s own joual-to-English shifts and ongoing translation efforts, the discussion shows how his work circulates worldwide, raising questions about mediation and cross-cultural accessibility.
9Taken together, Rethinking Kerouac demonstrates how an author too often reduced to caricature or cliché continues to generate new, sometimes surprising lines of inquiry. Rather than treating Kerouac as either saint or scapegoat, the contributors reveal how his work unsettles categories of all kinds. Whether in the archive, in translation, in the classroom, or in dialogue with emerging technologies, Kerouac’s legacy remains anything but fixed: it is being contested, revised, and continually reimagined. More than a century after his birth, he endures as a writer who challenges us to rethink not only American literature, but the culture and contradictions that surround it.
References
Electronic reference
Jimmy Fazzino, “Erik Mortenson and Tomasz Sawczuk, editors. Rethinking Kerouac: Afterlives, Continuities, Reappraisals”, European journal of American studies [Online], Book reviews, Online since 07 April 2026, connection on 06 May 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/25749; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/166fz
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