I could lay my hands on. And I took road trip after road trip. The more I read and experienced, the less interest I had in a life of advertising and public relations. Kerouac remained an increasingly blurry memory until I jump-started my academic career and studied the poetry of the Beats, on my own, as I attended poetry workshops. It is probably no coincidence that I found myself in San Francisco just a few short weeks before this semester began, where I spent several hours in City Lights Bookstore and several more hours in Cafe Vesuvio next door, the only remaining North Beach watering hole of Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, Snyder, et al.
Nothing is as simple as it first appears.
And yet everything is even simpler than it seems. The research for my paper, I surmised, would involve the re-reading of On the Road , some exploration of literary criticism, and a look at the influence of the novel upon succeeding generations of fiction. Instead, I found myself exploring the jazz influence on Kerouac's writing, the importance of western and eastern religion in his life and writing philosophy, the role of Kerouac's friends in his work, and the absolute insistence he had on living and transcribing his life as a work of art. The paper became less about On the Road and more about his hybrid spirituality of Roman Catholic Buddhism as seen in The Dharma Bums and the divergent spiritual paths taken by Kerouac and Gary Snyder, the inspiration behind the novel. My research also led to many more questions than answers, primarily how one could pull all of this into focus for a ten-page paper.