SOURCE: ‘Jazz America’: Jazz and African American Culture in Jack Kerouac's On the Road,” Contemporary Literature, Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring, 1999, pp. 85-110.

In the following essay, Malcolm discusses Jack Kerouac's use of jazz and the deeper influence of African-American culture in his novel On the Road.

In a 1995 review of Ann Charters's The Portable Jack Kerouac and Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956, Ann Douglas comments that Jack Kerouac's work “represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation” (2). While Kerouac's poetics, articulated in “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” have literary antecedents—he admired writers as different as William Carlos Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and William S. Burroughs—his literary experimentation was also modeled on his understanding of jazz improvisation. A number of Kerouac's biographers and critics, of course, have recognized this source; however, while their views differ on...