"The Road Goes Ever On"

Tolkien and Kerouac? Why not: the 1960s generation of college students and hippies made The Lord of the Rings a major phenomenon by devouring the illicit Ace edition. A few years before, their elder siblings were reading Kerouac. Tolkien's Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are both major road novels, leading to dangers, exploits, and exultations that Kerouac's late 1940s characters couldn't know.

R. W. Watkins posted a short comment on "On the Electronic Road" and mentioned is piece on Kerouac on "Outside Writers."  He gives a good discussion of some of the less-known aspects of Kerouac's influence, achievements, and lapses. Rob mentions  Kerouac's right-wing attitude toward the end of his life. That's implicit as early as On the Road, where he rails against Communism. I believe it was William Buckley who listed Keroauc along with T. S. Eliot and others as conservative writers. Those ideological boxes are too confining, of course, for any reasonably good writer.

Would Frodo or Bilbo have hopped freight with Jack? Only if it moved them closer to completing their missions. Kerouac's mission was of a different order.

Rob and some of his commenters mention Kerouac's poetry. Against a strong wind of opinion (including Denise Levertov, whose poetry I admire greatly), I really like Kerouac's poetry, from Mexico City Blues through the various other collections that have surfaced. There's a lightness, a zaniness, a freedom in what he does that continues to appeal to me. He also has a sharp eye for the telling detail.

And that's not mentioning his skill with haiku or the haibun embedded in some of his novels.

At the end, I don't care about labels such as "beat," "hippy," "great writer," "right-winger," "left-winger," and all the other notations of the sorry mind. If you don't like anything Kerouac wrote, adore his every scribble, or simply don't care, literary reputations wax and wine, are completely lost and rediscovered by happenstance. Life's too short to fight the battles many of us choose.

I like Tolkien's poetry too.