Jean-Christophe Cloutier is associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (Columbia, 2019) and editor of Kerouac’s La vie est d’hommage and Sur le chemin. He also translated two of Kerouac’s French manuscripts for The Unknown Kerouac from the Library of America.

An astonishing, revelatory, and overdue reassessment of that classic avatar of the white, male, American novelist: Jack Kerouac. The Kerouac that emerges in Big American Writer is as crisscrossed, entangled, and bound by hybrid lineages and historical fault lines as the continent itself. Beautifully written, superbly wry, healthily skeptical, charmingly open-hearted, argued with delightful close readings and meticulous archival research, this is criticism of the finest kind. It opens your eyes; it makes you see things anew.

• Introduction. “The Canuck in America”: Jack Kerouac and the Making of a “Big American Writer”1. “I Never Had a Language of My Own”: French Canadianness, Ethnicity, and Bilingualism, 1950–19512. “Shall I Just Write My Units Every Day and File Them in Proper Place?”: The Essentials of Archival Prose, 1951–19523. “As Soon as I Finish Translating and Typing”: On the Path to Sur le chemin, 1952–19534. “Meanings That Can Never Be Recorded in the English Language”: Maggie Cassidy, Old Angel Midnight, and Creolization, 1953–1964Coda. “It’s a Whole Dream That’ll End Before We Finish It”: Kerouac, 100 Years on the Go!, 1965–Present DayAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (Columbia, 2019) and editor of Kerouac’s La vie est d’hommage and Sur le chemin. He also translated two of Kerouac’s French manuscripts for The Unknown Kerouac from the Library of America.

An astonishing, revelatory, and overdue reassessment of that classic avatar of the white, male, American novelist: Jack Kerouac. The Kerouac that emerges in Big American Writer is as crisscrossed, entangled, and bound by hybrid lineages and historical fault lines as the continent itself. Beautifully written, superbly wry, healthily skeptical, charmingly open-hearted, argued with delightful close readings and meticulous archival research, this is criticism of the finest kind. It opens your eyes; it makes you see things anew.

• Introduction. “The Canuck in America”: Jack Kerouac and the Making of a “Big American Writer”1. “I Never Had a Language of My Own”: French Canadianness, Ethnicity, and Bilingualism, 1950–19512. “Shall I Just Write My Units Every Day and File Them in Proper Place?”: The Essentials of Archival Prose, 1951–19523. “As Soon as I Finish Translating and Typing”: On the Path to Sur le chemin, 1952–19534. “Meanings That Can Never Be Recorded in the English Language”: Maggie Cassidy, Old Angel Midnight, and Creolization, 1953–1964Coda. “It’s a Whole Dream That’ll End Before We Finish It”: Kerouac, 100 Years on the Go!, 1965–Present DayAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (Columbia, 2019) and editor of Kerouac’s La vie est d’hommage and Sur le chemin. He also translated two of Kerouac’s French manuscripts for The Unknown Kerouac from the Library of America.

An astonishing, revelatory, and overdue reassessment of that classic avatar of the white, male, American novelist: Jack Kerouac. The Kerouac that emerges in Big American Writer is as crisscrossed, entangled, and bound by hybrid lineages and historical fault lines as the continent itself. Beautifully written, superbly wry, healthily skeptical, charmingly open-hearted, argued with delightful close readings and meticulous archival research, this is criticism of the finest kind. It opens your eyes; it makes you see things anew.

• Introduction. “The Canuck in America”: Jack Kerouac and the Making of a “Big American Writer”1. “I Never Had a Language of My Own”: French Canadianness, Ethnicity, and Bilingualism, 1950–19512. “Shall I Just Write My Units Every Day and File Them in Proper Place?”: The Essentials of Archival Prose, 1951–19523. “As Soon as I Finish Translating and Typing”: On the Path to Sur le chemin, 1952–19534. “Meanings That Can Never Be Recorded in the English Language”: Maggie Cassidy, Old Angel Midnight, and Creolization, 1953–1964Coda. “It’s a Whole Dream That’ll End Before We Finish It”: Kerouac, 100 Years on the Go!, 1965–Present DayAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex