Related Fiction

Boyle, T. Coraghessan. “Beat.” In Without a Hero and Other Stories. New York: Viking, 1994.

In this mischievous short story, a 17-year-old “Beat” searches out his hero Jack Kerouac and spends Christmas in Northport with him, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady.

Duberman, Martin, B. Visions of Kerouac : A Play . Boston: Little Brown, 1977.

According to Duberman, this play is a “meditation on Kerouac's life” just as Visions of Cody is a meditation on Neal Cassady's life. Additionally, the play deals with friendship, emotions, and growing up male in America. It caused considerable controversy when performed in New York City in late 1976.

Holmes, John Clellon . Go: A Novel . New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1988.

Published five years before On the Road, Go is generally acknowledged to be the first Beat novel depicting the underground counterculture that questioned the complacency of the 1950s. Its characters bear many similarities to those in other Kerouac work. Its main characters are recognizable as thinly-disguised portraits of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassady, and friend Herbert Huncke.

Kerouac, Jan. Baby Driver . New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981.

Following in her father's footsteps, Jan Kerouac offers a view of the generation that followed her father's Beat Generation. As a woman “on the road,” she takes us through her own version of the psychedelic 1960s. While in her teens she experiences street life in New York's Lower East Side, LSD, probation, and a personal tragedy in Mexico. It is only in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and the state of Washington that she eventually finds peace. This is Jan Kerouac's first book.

Kerouac, Jan. Trainsong . New York: Henry Holt, 1988.

In her second book, Jan continues her quest for identity as she returns from South America to replenish herself at home with her mother in Oregon. Soon she is back to her frenetic life exploration: a love affair, a new marriage, passage on a Yugoslavian freighter, stops in Casablanca, Tangier, London, and once again New York. Later her marriage collapses and she spends a night in jail. Through it all she harbors the image of a father she hardly knew — a man pushing her on in a relentless search for her own identity.

Index

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