Authors Like Jack Kerouac

Allen Ginsberg

American · Howl and Other Poems

Ginsberg and Kerouac met at Columbia in 1944 and remained close for the rest of Kerouac's life. Howl was tried for obscenity in 1957, the same year On the Road was published, and the two events made the Beats a public phenomenon.

The other half of the same movement, and the one who kept it alive for forty more years. Read Howl for the sound Kerouac was chasing in prose.

William S. Burroughs

American · Naked Lunch

The third point of the original triangle, and by far the strangest writer of the three. Naked Lunch was assembled from fragments and cut-ups into something closer to a hallucination than a novel, and was itself the subject of an obscenity trial.

Kerouac gave Naked Lunch its title. Read Burroughs if what draws you to the Beats is the willingness to break the form rather than the romance of the road.

Gary Snyder

American · Riprap, Turtle Island

A poet, translator and Zen practitioner who spent years in Japanese monasteries and worked as a fire lookout in the Cascades. He won the Pulitzer for Turtle Island in 1975.

He is Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums, and he is what Kerouac wanted to become and could not. Read him if the mountain-and-meditation Kerouac is the one you liked.

Joyce Johnson

American · Minor Characters

Johnson was twenty-one and living in New York when she began a relationship with Kerouac, weeks before On the Road made him famous. Minor Characters is her memoir of those years, and it won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983.

The necessary correction to every other book on this list. The road was open to the men; Johnson writes what it was to be the person waiting in the apartment, and she writes it better than most of them wrote anything.

Henry Miller

American · Tropic of Cancer

Miller wrote first-person, unstructured, deliberately obscene autobiographical novels about being broke in Paris two decades before the Beats, and was banned in the United States until 1961.

The clearest precursor. Kerouac's spontaneous prose is Miller's method with the engine of a car under it instead of a Paris garret.

Thomas Wolfe

American · Look Homeward, Angel

Enormous, rhapsodic, barely-edited autobiographical novels about American longing, published in the late 1920s and 1930s. His editor Maxwell Perkins cut tens of thousands of words and Wolfe resented it.

Kerouac named him repeatedly as the writer who taught him that America itself could be the subject. The rhythm of the long sentences comes from here.

Ken Kesey

American · One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Kesey took the Merry Pranksters across America by bus in 1964 with Neal Cassady — the model for Dean Moriarty — at the wheel, which makes him the literal bridge from the Beats to the counterculture.

Same continent, same restlessness, ten years later and with better drugs. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the account of that trip if you want it from outside.

Charles Bukowski

American · Post Office, Ham on Rye

Bukowski wrote plainly and repetitively about drinking, working dead-end jobs in Los Angeles, and failing at relationships, under a barely disguised alter ego called Henry Chinaski.

No romance about the road at all — just the drinking and the wreckage. Read him if the Kerouac you recognise is the one who died at forty-seven of cirrhosis rather than the one in the car.

Richard Brautigan

American · Trout Fishing in America

Brautigan wrote very short, very strange books that look like novels but behave like poems, and became a fixture of 1960s San Francisco after the Beats had scattered.

The Beat inheritance with the earnestness removed. Read him if the parts of Kerouac you liked were the odd, floating, unexplained ones.

Hunter S. Thompson

American · Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Thompson took the first-person American road narrative into journalism and let the reporter's own state become the story, most famously on a drug-fuelled drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

The direct descendant. Same country, same car, same conviction that the trip is the point, with a decade of disillusionment in between.

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