The Beat Generation by Christopher Gair

Author:Christopher Gair [Gair, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780741307
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

Although little read now, Thomas Wolfe (1900–38) was one of the most significant American writers of the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, Wolfe was often favourably compared with Ernest Hemingway as a writer able to capture the essence of American life. Wolfe’s four major novels – Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Of Time and the River (1935), The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940) – served as prototypes for Kerouac’s project of turning his life into fiction. Wolfe’s childhood in Asheville, North Carolina was considerably more affluent than Kerouac’s working-class origins in Lowell, but his eagerness to escape the oppressive provincialism that he sensed in Asheville resulted in a life divided between travelling and living in New York which anticipated Kerouac’s own. Wolfe’s fiction – like Kerouac’s – is generally about himself, tracing his life from the innocence of a southern childhood through his college education to his experiences as a writer. His passages depicting the American landscape of the 1930s (often described as it flashes before his eyes through the window of a train) serve both as inspiration and model for sections of On the Road where Sal describes the experience of seeing the country disappear behind him as he and Dean race across the continent. In many ways, Wolfe’s (near obsessive) interest in the workings of memory and his quest for meaning in life act as precursors to Kerouac’s ‘Legend of Duluoz’. Wolfe was also instrumental in shaping Kerouac’s ideas about spontaneous prose. He also wrote at speed, with little revision, although he experienced pressure from editors to revise his works for publication which foreshadowed the insistence of Malcolm Cowley and others that On the Road be revised and rewritten several times before it was published.

Kerouac’s first published novel, The Town and the City, is highly reminiscent of Wolfe in both style and content. It is possible that the large Martin family (in which Kerouac’s persona is spread across several brothers) was inspired by Wolfe’s own treatment of his childhood as the youngest of eight children. Subsequently, however, Kerouac’s attitude to Wolfe’s prose style – if not his books’ content – became more equivocal and he rejected what he perceived to be the conventional structuring of Wolfe’s language, replacing it with his own form of spontaneous prose.

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