Kerouac’s Crooked Road is now available from:
Southern Illinois University Press
What others are saying about Kerouac’s Crooked Road:
Keroauac's Crooked Road
Tim Hunt’s wonderful book—impeccably researched, beautifully written, as subtle as it is sophisticated—pioneered serious scholarship of Kerouac’s major novels, On the Road and Visions of Cody. It is also that rare thing, a critical work that broke new ground for others to build on and yet is as important and useful today as it ever was. Still pointing the way, Kerouac’s Crooked Road remains a classic for readers and a model for scholars
Tim Hunt´s seminal study mediates the breathless lionizing and hyperventilated attacks of the writer´s reception with the first systematic, sustained analysis of Kerouac´s evolution as novelist. Initially published in 1981, Kerouac´s Crooked Road examines a pivotal five-year interval in which, Hunt shows, Kerouac sequentially and simultaneously produced the legendary On the Road and the masterwork Visions of Cody. Writing a crucial literary history, Hunt establishes Kerouac´s American lineage through Melville, Twain and Fitzgerald, charting his canonical apprenticeship in On the Road to its apex in the peerless innovation of “wild form” in Visions of Cody. A work of undiminished influence, Kerouac´s Crooked Road vanquishes the hype to elucidate the writer´s techniques and philosophies of composition. This groundbreaking book is relevant and accessible to general readers, and provides scholars an essential critical foundation. There is nothing else like it in Kerouac studies.
2 Comments
what was/is the connection-if there is one- between Jeffers and the Beats. Granted the 2nd generation of SF Ren poes learned from Jeffers (Snyder, Welch, Whalen, Everson- possible on of the finest Jeffer scholars ever) while some of the 1st gen (Rexroth) thought Jeffers wasn’t that good.
Also, what is your opinion of Everson as a Jeffers scholar?
Jeffer’s influencen Snyder and Buke? Welch?
good luck with your poems.
resp.,
michael
m.r. merris
Dear Michael,
You’re quite right that Kenneth Rexroth was extremely negative in his comments about Jeffers, but Rexroth’s project as a poet wasn’t as antithetical to Jeffers’ project as Rexroth wanted his readers and his acolytes to believe. George Hart has done some excellent work on Jeffers, Rexroth, Everson, and Snyder and the ways their work constitute a western poetic tradition.
What all these poets share is a willingness to take nature as their poetic ground. Rexroth might not have liked the way Jeffers did this, but Jeffers offered him an alternative paradigm to the one Pound and Eliot offered (in which culture is the poetic ground). Jeffers also offered a particular sense of nature, one in which nature figures as a kind of comprehensive organism rather than a set of things left behind by an absent deity. This move not only accentuates the importance of nature but it also reorders the relationship of part to whole. Snyder and Everson have explicitly acknowledged the importance of Jeffers to their work. Neither Welch nor Whalen did (so far as I know), but it’s plausible that they learned certain moves from him or indirectly from him through Snyder and Everson (and even Rexroth).
Everson was a particularly acute and sympathetic reader of Jeffers. Like any powerful poet discussing another poet, Everson’s discussions can at times be as revealing about Everson’s own project as a poet as about Jeffers. Everson’s engagements of Jeffers were always, I believe, driven in part by his own creative needs. This gives them some of their depth of insight. Early in his career Henry James wrote a study of Hawthorne. Reading it, we can sense James needing to construct Hawthorne in a certain way so that Hawthorne can, in effect, authorize James. Everson at times is, I think, involved in a similar negotiation.
I haven’t, to be honest, done much to follow out Burke’s interest in Jeffers, but if my memory serves me, there are some places where Burke notes an interest in Jeffers.
As to Jeffers and the Beats: Jeffers’ importance to Everson and Snyder has less to do with their being “Beat,” more to do with their being west coast poets. Ginsberg would, plausibly, have at some point had some interest in Jeffers’ tactics for managing long verse lines. These are relatively minor matters. On the whole, trying to construct Jeffers as a kind of proto-Beat seems more a detour to a dead end than a highway waiting to be engineered. Now exploring Vachel Lindsay as a precursor: let’s start melting the asphalt and get to paving.
Best,
Tim
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