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. The vision encompasses his fictional rewriting of his personal history, 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 speak of and to a new age. The book features chapters on Some of the Dharma, Doctor Sax, On the Road, Desolation Angels, and Mexico City Blues.

Nancy M. Grace is a professor of English at The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. She is the co-author of Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Beat Women Writers, the co-editor of Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation, and author of The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Fiction. She has published articles and given papers on Jack Kerouac, James Joyce, interdisciplinary studies, gender studies, and rhetoric and composition. She is also one of the founding members of the Beat Studies Association.