Word: kerouac
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...Vice President Nixon in search of prominence. Mort Sahl earned $100,000 a year kidding the splayfoot, clayfoot maneuvers of the middle class, in and out of ofiice. Jules Feiffer, Walt Kelly, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and Mad magazine all flourished in the allegedly timid decade. Jack Kerouac's road, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, Gregory Corso's curses -these too issued in the '50s, when the beats marched to an indifferent drummer...
Ginsberg flirts with his craft, though. He refuses to submit to any control, relying on Jack Kerouac's famous spontaneous prose theories. As a result, almost all of his poems are spotted with badly wrought images and incongruous inanities. These add unintended disappointments to the intentional depression of his sad confessionals and his strong social criticisms...
...Kerouac also appeared to have lacerated himself with honesty, as if his truth were a scourge that could bring him closer to the state of beatitude-the word from which he said the term "beat" had been derived. That view is confirmed by Mrs. Charters in her sympathetic and levelheaded biography...
...back as 1959, two years after On the Road came out, Kerouac attempted to correct his wild-man public image. At college seminars and in the pages of Playboy, he traced the roots of his beatness to his fiercely independent ancestors in Brittany. He followed them to French Canada and later to New Hampshire, where his grandfather would shake his lantern at lightning and dare God to strike him down. But it was Lowell, Mass., where he was born and raised, that enraptured Kerouac. It was the whole lost prewar world of Friday-night beers, Saturday ball games, dips...
...naturally from the Beat Generation into the acid culture. He joined Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters and was last seen heading into Mexico, where in 1968 he dropped dead next to a railroad track after a spree fueled by a fatal blend of drugs and alcohol. Thus ended Kerouac's final vision: he and his friend Cassady growing old together, living with their families on the same street in some quiet backwater. Very touching, and very American. James Fenimore Cooper fantasies the last Mohicans, Kerouac dreams up Neal Cassady as the last cowboy. · R. Z. Sheppard