American Author Proposal

American Author Proposal
Author: Jack Kerouac

The author I would like to read for my American Author project is Jack Kerouac. Jack was born in Massachusetts in 1922 to French-Canadian parents. He went to college in Colombia University but later on dropped out because his scholar-ship in college football didn’t follow through after he broke his leg. He later went to New York where he would meet the people he would travel with and eventually form the Beat Generation.
Kerouac wrote many short novels and poems (some that were even in French which was his native tongue) throughout his life, but his first real novel was “On the Road”. Jack Kerouac wrote his novel “On the Road” after 7 years of travelling with his friends across the United States. He and his friends often went from New York to San Francisco, down South, and to Texas. In his book he uses first person and talks about real events that actually happened but some editions puts in some fictional characters that are based on real people in his life. The story is a continuous diary entry of the events and his thoughts on life and anything in it. The story has no plot, but has secret messages within the text and they are things that Kerouac is trying to tell people. By writing down his every thought he captures the audience into his story and mind so that you better understand and feel what it is like to be there doing what he and his friends are doing.
The books I plan on reading are “On the Road” and “The Dharma Bums”. I began to read “On the Road” and am enjoying it a lot. I want to read “The Dharma Bums” because it talks about his life after he became a Buddhist and it sounds very interesting. I decided to read it in that order because “On the Road” is his first book and to me it makes more sense to read the first book and then read the other ones so I can see how his writing has improved or changed and compare the two to each other. The edition of On the Road that I am reading is the original scroll that has his and his friends’ actual names instead of the fictional character names that were given to them later on.
Jack Kerouac is considered very important to the world of literature because he brought a new style of writing and influenced many people like, Allen Ginsberg, who wrote his well-know and controversial poem “Howl” based on Kerouac’s style of writing. Kerouac called his style “Spontaneous Prose” which was influenced by Jazz and Bebop and is similar to the technique: stream of consciousness; which seeks to portray an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her sensory reactions to external occurrences. Stream-of-consciousness writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement (wikipedia). Kerouac preferred to type non-stop on a long scroll of paper. In his original scrolls he did not use paragraphs, just one long one, or chapters. His style was to his dislike very influential to the Hippie Movement. Kerouac was very influenced by Gary Snyder and wrote about their mountain trip in “the Dharma Bums”. It is said that another reason he writes on one scroll is because he writes so fast. This could be so that he can get down every detail of thought on to the paper and changing the paper might make him lose his thought which would have been very disappointing on his part.
His style captures me as a reader and I really enjoy reading about his experiences because they influence me. I would love to read his books and write about them because his style of writing is the type that I like because it is free and without limits.