This long overdue reevaluation of Jack Kerouac gives fresh perspectives on his unique literary output, his vexed relation to issues of race, class, and gender, as well as his continuing cultural afterlife.

This collection of essays by esteemed Beat commentators reassesses one of the 20th century's most emblematic but often misunderstood American writers. Despite amassing a substantial body of influential work and becoming a recognizable icon globally, Kerouac has often suffered critical neglect, and this volume seeks to offer a range of fresh perspectives on his unique artistic output as well as his continuing cultural afterlife.

Through an examination of classic texts like On the Road to more obscure ones like Pic, these essays recalibrate our understanding of the writer by placing his creative output into dialogue with current cultural issues to provide a rethinking of how concerns such as race, gender relations, artificial intelligence, populist rhetoric, and queerness inform his work and its contemporary reception. These essays also examine how the peculiarities of global circulation and social media influence the ongoing cultural appropriation of Kerouac in popular music, literature, and online.

Through these varied approaches, Rethinking Kerouac: Afterlives, Continuities, Reappraisals provides an indispensable account of the continued relevance of both Kerouac the writer and Kerouac the cultural icon in the 21st century.

Erik Mortenson is a Faculty Member in English at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Mortenson has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as several books, including Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence (2011), which won a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award; Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (2016); and Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey (2018). He has also published The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation (2023), co-edited with Tony Trigilio, along with the memoir Kick Out the Bottom (2023), co-written with Christopher Kramer. Mortenson is also a translator whose work has appeared in journals such as Asymptote, Talisman, and Two Lines.

Tomasz Sawczuk is Assistant Professor at University of Bialystok, Poland. In 2022 he was a Visiting Research Scholar at Fordham University, USA. Among his publications on Beat writers, film and popular culture are On the Road to Lost Fathers: Jack Kerouac in a Lacanian Perspective (2019) and a chapter contribution to The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature (2018). He also co-edited Visuality and Vision in American Literature (2014).