Jack Kerouac, once called "our most misunderstood and underestimated writer," is gradually emerging from that limbo, though much about him remains obscure. The obscurity results from a misreading of his books by critics who, borne along by Cold War prejudices, saw in Kerouac a fomenter of anarchy of nearly all kinds: sexual, psychological, political, and artistic. So possessed were these critics by the bogey they had invented that they failed to perceive an important truth about Kerouac: that his accomplishment was a complex and even a paradoxical one. A conservative in politics and a sincere Roman Catholic, Kerouac was rebellious only in a traditional way, in the tradition of the individualism of Emerson and Thoreau. He was no egocentric romantic. His shyness and gift for admiration made him honor not his own individuality so much as that of his friends, whom he referred to as members of the...