Praise for Jack Kerouac and The Subterraneans:
“Kerouac’s work represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation.”—Ann Douglas
“A book of raw power and awesome beauty.”—San Francisco Examiner
“On the Road is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’ and whose principal avatar he is . . . A major novel.”—New York Times
“Each book by Kerouac is unique, a telepathic discord. Such rich, natural writing is nonpareil in the later twentieth century.”—Allen Ginsberg
“An outsider in America, Jack Kerouac was a true original.”—Ann Charters
“The way that [On the Road] is so enduring—so impervious to shifting cultural winds—seems to indicate something about how successfully it articulates a very American rootlessness . . . A hysterical elegy for threatened male freedom . . . Might be the last great American novel about masculine seduction.”—New Yorker
“There is no doubt about [Kerouac’s] great sensitivity to language. His sentences frequently move into tempestuous sweeps and whorls and sometimes they have something of the rich music of Gerard Manley Hopkins or Dylan Thomas.”—New York Herald Tribune
“The first clear development of the American Romantic prose since Hemingway, Kerouac’s writing is full of mad sex, comedy, wide-screen travel writing, and long lyrical evocations of American childhood and adolescent memories.”—Times (UK)
