Search Results

“... the shaman of America’s commitment to e pluribus unum, a composite of Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac on the road to becoming a cosmos. I don’t hear so much as a whisper of reconciliation in Deavere Smith’s excoriating re-creation of hate and murder, but in this initial essay, Gubar finds in African American women’s art the comity that ...”

“... I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. ‘When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!’ Having triumphantly ghosted London’s autobiography, Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the Thames: generator of life, origin of the city, a passage ...”

“... premature suburban Mod. Raworth, uniquely, is both Ted and Mod: the rock’n’roll romanticism of Jack Kerouac with the unblinking stamina of the Soho cruiser; jazz and flash tailoring. ‘I learned to always strike the first blow when the tension mounts . . . and once that’s done, to never relax the pressure.’ Too much time on railway platforms, an ...”

“... since I’d met Adele Mailer a few years earlier, to interview her for a BBC programme about Jack Kerouac, and she filled my ears with information about Norman and told me to come and see her again at Henri Bendel, where she worked the scarves concession. ‘You’re a gentleman as well as a scholar,’ Norman said. ‘As a reward I’m going to let ...”

“... life found me interviewing Carolyn Cassady (author of Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg) in her comprehensively occupied Belsize Park flat. The unreality of this situation – talking, shoulder to shoulder, with one of the Beat Generation’s best-preserved icons – was ameliorated by the fact that our paths had crossed a ...”

“... around colourful local characters the narrator meets along the way. This is true of Steinbeck, Kerouac, William Least Heat-Moon in his Blue Highways and so on. Even the insufferable Henry Miller, in his 1945 volume The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, has his unrelieved bombast interrupted by a mechanic in Albuquerque called Dutter. The Maestro and I weren’t ...”

“... and Edie died, in bed, next to him, for uncertain but drug-related reasons. She was 28. Jan Kerouac survived the dangerous Sixties to write a thin book – which, in the circumstances, is something. Baby Driver (the title comes from a Paul Simon song) shows how much of the mythology of ‘the road’, ‘the road movie’, ‘the road runner’ is a ...”

“... rate. I had dropped out of college, and had been knocking around the continent pretending I was Jack Kerouac. My folks weren’t too thrilled with me, so when I came to town I stayed in the Village with my brother. He had begun to take more of an interest in me now that I showed signs of developing into a fully fledged fuck-up. I remember the ...”

“... literary spirits when Brautigan arrived in town would have been Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer (to whom Trout Fishing In America is dedicated). Writers such as Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, Snyder, Creeley would also have been moving through at this point, but the so-called Beat Scene was not fully fledged, and ...”

“... ethos was there from its beginnings in the 1950s: though hitchhiking is virtually absent from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, his Beat compadres drew on their experience of riding with long-distance truckers and drifters – Gary Snyder, for example, in his poem ‘Night Highway 99’. The proliferation of newly affordable saloon cars, along with the ...”

“... and hates his job. In The Easter Parade, one of Emily Grimes’s unhappy relationships is with Jack Flanders, a divorced writer who served in the war and is unable to repeat the success of his first book. Yates sent his soul out into the world in rather flimsy disguises. The Collected Stories were written between the end of the war and 1981. Although they ...”