Other works by this reclusive spare writer include: Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters a collection of stories from The New Yorker.
JACK KEROUAC (1922 – 1969):
The son of an impoverished French-Canadian family, Jack Kerouac also questioned the values of middle-class life. He met members of the beat literary underground as an undergraduate at Columbia university in NYC. His fiction was much influenced by the loosely autobiographical work of southern novelist Thomas Wolfe. Kerouac´s best-known novel, On the Road describes beatniks wandering through America seeking an idealistic dream of communal life and beauty. The Dharma Bums also focuses on peripatetic counterculture intellectuals and their infatuation with Zen Buddhism. Kerouac also panned a book of poetry, Mexico City Blues and volumes about his life with such beatniks as experimental novelist William Burroughs and poet Allen Ginsberg.







































GLOSSARY.

 Abolitionism – active movement to end slavery in the U.S. North before the Civil War in the 1860s.
 Beatnik – artistic and literary rebellion against established society of the 1950s and early 1960s, associated with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and others. Beat suggest holiness and suffering.
 Calvinism – strict theological doctrine of the French Protestant church reformer John Calvin and the basis of Puritan society. Calvin held that all humans were born sinful and only God´s grace could save a person from hell.
 Civil War – the war (1861 – 1865) between the northern U.S. states, which remained in the Union, and the southern states, which seceded and formed the Confederacy. The victory of the north ended slavery and preserved the Union.
 Enlightenment –an 18th-century movement that focused on the ideals of good sense, benevolence, and a belief in liberty, justice, and equality as the natural rights of man.
 Light literature – popular literature written for entertainment.
 Midwest – The central area of the United States, from the Ohio river to the Rocky Mountains, including the Prairie and Great Plains region.
 Myth – Legendary narrative, usually of gods and heroes, or a theme that expresses the ideology of a culture.
 Post-modernism – media-influenced aesthetic sensibility of the late 20th century characterized by open-end-endness and collage.
 Puritans – English religious and political reformers who fled their native land in search of religious freedom, and settled and colonised New England in the 17th century.
 Reflexive – self-referential.