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Jack Kerouac's Pursuit Of The American West, Dan Fliegel

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Called alternately "the father of hip," "King of the Beats," "the daddy of the swinging psychedelic generation," Jack Kerouac was less a thrill-seeking hipster than a serious author whose life and novels speak of our shared need to explore alternatives and renew ourselves, and of our frustration and regret for our movement away from tradition. Kerouac's life and literature can be viewed as an extended quest, an episodic series of explorations for meaning and for a way of life. He continually addressed the modernist question "How shall we live?," seeking answers in what one biographer calls an ongoing "pattern of …