Lonesome Traveler (1960)

Kerouac, Jack. Lonesome Traveler. Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007.

The progenitor of what fellow Beat poet Allen Ginsberg called "bop prosody" and best known for On the Road, Jack Kerouac was not only an original voice howling on behalf of a subterranean America; he was also a rather prolific and dynamic writer who secured a new epoch in the history of American literature. His abilities were wide-ranging: Compare, for example, his early pseudo-emulation of Thomas Wolfe, The Town and the City (1950), to, say, the later Tristessa (1960). Lonesome Traveler is a collection of short works based on his vagabond travels. The Portable Jack Kerouac, edited by his biographer Ann Charters, contains Kerouac's 30 rules for writing ("Belief and Technique for Modern Prose"). The twenty-eighth rule states: "Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better." He was a firm believer that one's passion for life would find its way onto the page if one let go of inhibitions and just went to town free-writing (Benzedrine was also often a part of the equation), so we get trademark Beat shortcuts such as "less" for "let's"; "coupla" for "couple of"; ampersands instead of "and"; and frequent commissions of direct and indirect articles. This gives the prose a snappy rhythm that can be sung from the page as if a bop song. In his own introduction to the novel, Kerouac tells us that he read a biography of Jack London at age 18 and decided to be an adventurer, too, a lonesome traveler. It is always a treat to read Kerouac, both for his distinctive style and the thrill of living vicariously through his experiences. Even when he is simply narrating mundane actions, the language crackles with energy: "...Deni fishes down for the old copper churchkey and comes up two cans of beer spissing all over the sad night and we up end the tin, and go slurp...."