Word: kerouac
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Sanity of Kerouac VANITY OF DULUOZ by Jack Kerouac. 280 pages. Coward-McCann...
...name of all the past and present editors of the Partisan Review did Jack Kerouac, cult leader of post-World War II intellectual vagrants, ever attain standing as a member (let alone chieftain) of the avantgarde? Vanity of Duluoz, his best book, is a picaresque novel in a tradition as old as Tristram Shandy and about as avant-garde as Laurence Sterne-a man in holy orders, puckish though...
Actually an autobiography, the book tells of Kerouac's rise (in Lowell, Mass.), his fall (on the high seas), and his moral death and resurrection in Manhattan. As a story, it is nothing much. Growing up, Kerouac accepts his household gods (Breton ancestry and Roman Catholic religion), goes to school, plays football, goes to sea, and comes home shorn of vanity and, one is given to hope, restored to sanity and innocence. The one touch of melodrama is provided by Kerouac's pal Claude who murders an obstreperous pansy...
Illogical Extension. The Haight-Ashbury is an illogical extension of such 1950-style scenes as Los Angeles' Venice West, New York's South Village, and San Francisco's own North Beach, where the beats of the Kerouac-Ferlinghetti-Ginsberg generation gathered in delicious despair. What has been added is a vague sense of mission, drawn from the ideals of the New Left and the new lotus-eaters. Central to that new theme are "The Diggers," who run a sort of psychedelic soup kitchen providing free chow to hungry hippies...
SATORI IN PARIS, by Jack Kerouac. The zestful, pie-eyed piper of the beats relates the details of a wacky safari to France in a vain effort to track down some supposedly noble Kerouac ancestors...