Description: Now a classic, Kerouac's Crooked Road was one of the first critical works on the legendary Beat writer to analyze his work as serious literary art, placing it in the broader American literary tradition with canonical writers like Herman Melville and Mark Twain. Author Tim Hunt explores Kerouac's creative process and puts his work in conversation with classic American literature and with critical theory.
Review Quotes:
Praise for previous editions:
"This is the best and most ambitious piece of analytic criticism yet written about Kerouac."
--George Dardess, Moody Street Irregulars
"[Hunt] demonstrates that Kerouac's fiction, unlike the commonly accepted notion of it as the work of a talented but undisciplined writer, is the result of labor and thought . . . [and] gives as lucid an explanation as I have seen of Kerouac's 'spontaneous prose' and 'sketching, ' relating both of these to jazz and painting."--The Review of Contemporary Fiction
"This is an enormously stimulating and rewarding study of a writer who may have been too quickly undervalued."--Warren French, Studies in American Fiction
"This is decidedly the best of the American books on Kerouac--smart, insightful, situating Kerouac firmly in the broader American tradition while remaining wonderfully alert to the themes and formal strategies that mark Kerouac's own highly innovative contribution to that tradition."--Ann Douglas, author of Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s