It is not a very common phenomenon, to see a genre of literature being created and inspired by a genre of music. This article talks about one such literary movement—The Beat Generation— and one of its key founders, Jack Kerouac.

Jack Kerouac, an American novelist of French-Canadian descent, was inducted into the Counterculture Hall of Fame in 1999, along with other progenitors of the Beat Generation, namely, Neal Cassidy, Allan Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. The term ‘beat’ was used by Kerouac to characterize the underground, anti-conformist youth movement in New York in 1948. While the term colloquially meant tired or ‘beaten down’, he altered the meaning to being ‘upbeat’, or ‘on the beat’.

After the World Wars, America was undergoing an identity crisis. The multitude of capitalist branding and advertising had left many enamoured by the ‘American Dream’. But the country was on the brink of war, a cold war. Despite living under the perpetual threat of annihilation, a small subset of the population remained unaffected by this overwhelming trend of taglines, products, and the promise of a glittering American life. This was the Beat Generation.

Kerouac was a lover of music, who frequented the hot jazz clubs of New York’s Harlem and San Francisco’s Fillmore Districts. Jazz, especially the form pioneered by artists like Miles Davis in 1959, was the cool, underground art-form that attracted beatniks like Jack Kerouac. It influenced his writing with its spontaneity and emphasis on taking the roads less travelled.

‘On the Road’, widely regarded as the best novel of the Beat Generation, is a collection of stories from Kerouac’s travels. This autobiographical novel provided insight into the underground community that shunned traditional society and searched for more authentic experiences. It was published in 1957 and followed the misadventures of Sal Paradise (Kerouac) and the anti-hero Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassidy) as they searched for meaning in their travels across America. The pair immerse themselves in the urban underground of New York and San Francisco, where a simmering counterculture was on the brink of a full-blown boil.

Kerouac’s importance as a post-war author was immediately evident because of his content and unique method of delivery. The concept of ‘beat’ introduced by him, was a communal creation based on existing concepts. What distinguished his writing from that of his peers was a narrative style that was characteristically spontaneous. This style was probably the product of converting jazz cadences into words and complex sentence structures. The ‘tempo’ of Kerouac’s writing embodied the feverish force behind his travels. Jazz was part of American culture and his passion for the genre and its adaptation into his writing paired his words perfectly with the American landscape and peculiar characters, which he had created in his works.

Quite like the music of Davis, Kerouac’s work was also based on a ‘first-take’ spirit underwritten by a dedication to the craft as displayed by their persistent preparation. Although, Kerouac told reporters that he had written ‘On the Road’ in a ‘three-week, benzedrine-driven ball on a single scroll’, his official archive revealed multiple revisions of the famous novel, some of which included wildly different characters and plot points. Kerouac, like a dedicated craftsman, spent most of his life obsessively developing his art as he brooded over word choice, sentence construction, and character development.

Another important aspect which played a role in shaping this novel was the help he received from his friends. Kerouac’s writing style has retrospectively been defined as Wolfean with jazz constructs and although, he was entirely dedicated to writing, Kerouac was still searching for his literary voice in the early stages of his life. His initial approach to writing was traditional as he attempted to emulate the writers that he admired most, like Thomas Wolf. A friend of Kerouac, Ed White suggested that he try an exercise called sketching, where he told the former to ‘sketch in the street like a painter, but with words’. This enabled him to move away from the ‘realm of fiction’ and focus on the truth, as it happened. He discarded his initial ideas of creating fictional characters and simply wrote about his journeys and interactions with people, as seen in the novel. He further used this technique to transcribe his ‘inner music’, which allowed him to write in a smooth flow, blurring the lines between his poetry and prose.

The Beat Generation was characterized by the rejection of standard values, spiritual quests, exploration of non-European religions, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration. The Beat Generation played a significant role in the making of society as we know it now. It is because of their open descriptions of sexuality and use of drugs that modern media has been freed of the shackles of censorship which restricted the authors, writers, and reporters of the early modern period. Along with ‘On the Road’, Kerouac’s other novels have continued to inspire writers, musicians, and activists, immortalizing Kerouac as ‘The King of the Beat’.