SOURCE: “On the Road Reconsidered: Kerouac and the Modernist Tradition,” in Ball State University Forum, Vol. 30, No. 1, winter, 1989, pp. 59-67.

In the following essay, Malmgren asserts that Kerouac achieved an anti-Modernist aesthetic in On the Road.

There was a conference in Boulder, Colorado, in the summer of 1982 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. In the brochure advertising the week-long multimedia “event,” various novelists, poets, and critics paid tribute to Kerouac's literary accomplishments. Not surprisingly, the compliments and claims are hyperbolic. William Tallman asserts that “you've got to get past Jack to get down to writing in our time.” James Laughlin states, “I think he was a turning point in the history of modern American fiction.” And the poet Ted Berrigan goes so far as to say, “I think that only with the arrival of Jack Kerouac did American fiction become...