Department of English

This course will take an in depth look into the life and career of one of the most globally influential writers of the 20th Century, Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), as a means of exploring the manifold strands of countercultural forces that emerged in the wake of the Second World War in the United States. In this first-year seminar, we will read a selection of Kerouac’s works alongside seminal texts from a slew of other postwar rebels in order to investigate the tremendous ferment of counterculture that rose against containment culture, surveillance, warfare, capitalism, materialism, and prescribed sexual norms. Tracing Kerouac’s journey on the American continent will take us through the Great Depression, the atom bomb, the interstate highway system, the rise of the suburbs, the birth of cool, bebop, & rock n’ roll, the emergence of the hipster, of Playboy, of hippie and drug culture, the fight for gay rights, along with the desegregation of schools in the wake of Brown vs Board of Education, and so much more. Labeled “King of the Beats” and regarded as the de facto leader of the Beat Generation, Kerouac was in many ways a misunderstood outsider in America. He was born Jean-Louis Kérouac to immigrant parents and only spoke French until he was six years old, becoming fully bilingual only in his late teens. And yet, Kerouac left an indelible, transnational impact on English literature and culture, influencing generations of writers, musicians, artists, and a global reading public. Even a century after his birth, all his works are in print, his archive keeps yielding more posthumous publications, his books are translated into new languages around the world, and new biographies (over 25 at last count) and documentaries keep being produced (e.g. 2025’s Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation, Universal Pictures). Course readings will further include those of Kerouac’s immediate counterparts & collaborators like Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Amiri Baraka, Diane DiPrima, and others. Assignments will consist of brief weekly responses to the readings, a “spontaneous prose” exercise, a short essay on a related topic of your choice, and will culminate in a report tracing an aspect of Kerouac’s countercultural legacy on a contemporary phenomenon, group, text, or individual.