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Jack Kerouac

By: V. De Felice, G. Santecchia, B. Verucci, G. Zardi

The life and the beat generation

  • He was born in Massachusetts in 1922;
  • Son of French-Canadian immigrants;
  • His brother Gerard died;
  • Football;
  • Military in WWII;
  • N. Cassady;
  • Hitchhiking;
  • Alcoholism;
  • He died in 1969.

  • rebellion and bohemian living;
  • refusal to traditional middle class values;
  • rejection of materialism and organised religion;
  • search for alternative ways to find spiritual understanding.

Key features

Writers during beat movement

Their own wild and rebellious lifestyle in the late 1950s and the early 1960s.

cultural Revolution

The Beatniks

  • Contercultural 'type': beatniks;
  • a journalist of the 'San Francisco Chronicle' created the term 'beatnik;
  • '-nik' suffix by Sputnik.

The Beatniks

Main features

  • Beatniks lived in dirty apartments;
  • they wore hair long, old T-shirt and sandals: disregarding the convention of dress and personal cleanliness;
  • they acted on impulse, committed crimes for money and explored nudity;
  • they used hallucinogenic drugs and alcohol;
  • across the country along Route 66;
  • they created an 'underground culture';
  • reference place: City Lights bookstore in San Francisco;
  • they transitioned and transformed into the hippie movement.

Main features

from the 50's

to the 60's

Background

  • worsening conditions in the cities
  • feminism
  • the Vietnam War
  • rebellions
  • the post-WWII economy and birth boom
  • the dawn of the Cold War
  • the Civil Rights movement

On the road (1957)

  • Story of a friendship and of Kerouac's wanderings across North America

Kerouac -> Sal Paradise

Neal Cassady -> Dean Moriarty

On the road (1957)

  • The structure is episodic: there isn't a central plot
  • Themes:

-Journey: symbol of the escape from city and one's own past;

-restlessness and uneasiness -> desire to get going

  • no destination;
  • they find nothing at the end of the journey.

"Sal, we gotta go and never stop going 'till we get there."

"Where we going, man?"

Key words

"I don't know but we gotta go."

Main characters

  • Sal Paradise
  • Dean Moriarty
  • Carlo Marx
  • Old Bull Lee

The characters

Style

  • Spontaneous;
  • through writing he comes into one's mind;
  • language as 'hip talk' (meaning street language).

Style

Route 66

  • Famous American highway from Chicago to Los Angeles;
  • it opened in 1926 and it was about 4000 kilometres (it passed in the centre of many cities and towns, deserts, mountains and valleys);
  • it was official removed in 1985 from the national highway system;
  • influenced many companies, films and books, USA television.

Route 66

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