A01=Matt Theado
Allen Ginsberg
Author_Matt Theado
Beatnik
Category=DSRC
Desolation Angels (novel)
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Hamlet's Father
Herb Caen
Jack Kerouac
Maggie Cassidy
Malcolm Cowley
Mexico City Blues
Minor Characters
On the Mountain
On the Road
Robert Frost
Stephen Crane
The Town and the City
Tristessa
Vanity of Duluoz
Visions of Cody
William Saroyan
Product details
- ISBN 9781570038464
- Weight: 271g
- Dimensions: 127 x 203mm
- Publication Date: 29 May 2009
- Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This is a concise companion to the novels of the king of the Beats. ""Understanding Jack Kerouac"" introduces readers to what Matt Theado calls Kerouac's 'unwieldy accretion of published work' - fiction, poetry, nonfiction, selected letters, religious writing, and 'true-story novels'. Presenting this cultural icon of the Beat Generation primarily as a writer rather than as a social rebel or media celebrity, Theado elucidates the reasons Kerouac's reputation has outlived disparaging beatnik associations and why his writings continue to attract an expanding readership. Theado takes a book-by-book approach to the sometimes-confusing canon and develops a framework for understanding Kerouac's thematic concerns, writing techniques, and artistic evolution. Proposing that the real legend of Jack Kerouac is the saga of a writer at work, Theado suggests that as recognition of Kerouac's artistic achievement grows, the Duluoz Legend - Kerouac's series of barely fictionalized re-creations of his life - outgrows the genre of autobiography and becomes an intimate chronicle of a writer's stylistic maturation. Theado traces Kerouac's development as a crafter of language and contends that spontaneous prose, Kerouac's literary hallmark, may prove to be his chief claim to literary longevity.
Matt Theado is a professor of English at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, and the author of The Beats: A Literary Reference.
