ject of setting about creating distinctive expressive styles that challenged the literary expectations of readers who shaped and were shaped by that society. According to Johnson, Kerouac's literary style and technique, influenced by the diction of both James Joyce and Herman Melville, were "hybrid . . . amalgamations of African-American cultural and musical styles with canonical European-derived literary ones."
Lionized as he was by mass media, Kerouac maintained a peripatetic existence, continually traveling the country to find inspiration. Experimentation with drugs and alcohol that began in the early fifties persisted and developed into clinical alcoholism, despite his love affair with Buddhism, which helps explain his uneven, though always idiosyncratic and personalized, creative output after 1957. The drugs, alcohol, and casual marriage and sex, indeed, seem to have been endemic to the beat generation, with use of controlled substances and promiscuity configured as something of a protest aga
...