Angelheaded hipster

by Steve Turner

In the fifties, the movies had James Dean and Marlon Brando. Rock 'n' roll had Elvis Presley. The American novel had Jack Kerouac. Jack Kerouac was the father of the Beat Generation and the creator of a "spontaneous bop prose" style, which embodied the riffing and improvisation techniques that were used by jazz heroes such as Charlie Parker and Lester Young. In novels like The Subterraneans, On the Road, and The Dharma Bums, Kerouac portrayed characters hungry for experience and eager to discover a new vision of life. He made the life of a writer sound exciting and, along with his Beat contemporaries, helped liberate poetry from the page and took it to places more commonly associated with music or art or comedy: the jazz club, the coffee house, the art gallery, and the concert hall. Essentially a writer with spiritual preoccupations, he helped make the discussion of religion and spirituality hip by embracing the apparent paradox that it was often the wretched and despised, the "poor in