Jack Kerouac has long been mythologized as an all-American figure: the “King of the Beats,” forever hitchhiking on the road, who gave voice to a postwar generation of rebels. In fact, he was born Jean-Louis Kérouac to immigrant parents from Québec and was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. Throughout his career, Kerouac not only secretly composed French manuscripts but also served as a self-translator to negotiate between French and English. In his bilingual journals, Kerouac lamented the wounds of assimilation and what he called the impossibility of living in French in the United States.Big American Writer recasts Jack Kerouac as an ethnic, bilingual author, demonstrating that his French Canadian upbringing and background were formative to his breakthrough literary achievements. Building on years of archival excavation, Jean-Christophe Cloutier demystifies the Beat writer’s complex compositional practices and techniques of self-translation. He reveals that Kerouac pioneered new ways of capturing the orality of North American French in his manuscripts and invented the “Spontaneous Prose Method” in part as a reaction to his thwarted hope to live in French. Reading Kerouac’s secret French manuscripts and multilingual prose poem Old Angel Midnight alongside well-known works such as On the Road, Cloutier demonstrates how Kerouac’s writing engages with the complexity of ethnic identity in the United States. Offering a new lens on an often-misunderstood figure, Big American Writer shows why Kerouac’s bilingualism changes how we understand his place in North American literature.

Recasting the history of African American literature, Shadow Archives brings to life a slew of newly discovered texts—including Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth—to tell the stories of black special collections and their struggle for institutional recognition. Jean-Christophe Cloutier offers revelatory readings of major African American writers, including McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison, and provides a nuanced view of how archival methodology, access, and the power dynamics of acquisitions shape literary history.Shadow Archives argues that the notion of the archive is crucial to our understanding of postwar African American literary history. Cloutier combines his own experiences as a researcher and archivist with a theoretically rich account of the archive to offer a pioneering study of the importance of African American authors’ archival practices and how these shaped their writing. Given the lack of institutions dedicated to the black experience, the novel became an alternative site of historical preservation, a means to ensure both individual legacy and group survival. Such archivism manifests in the work of these authors through evolving lifecycles where documents undergo repurposing, revision, insertion, falsification, transformation, and fictionalization, sometimes across decades. An innovative interdisciplinary consideration of literary papers, Shadow Archives proposes new ways for literary scholars to engage with the archive.

Recasting the history of African American literature, Shadow Archives brings to life a slew of newly discovered texts—including Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth—to tell the stories of black special collections and their struggle for institutional recognition. Jean-Christophe Cloutier offers revelatory readings of major African American writers, including McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison, and provides a nuanced view of how archival methodology, access, and the power dynamics of acquisitions shape literary history.Shadow Archives argues that the notion of the archive is crucial to our understanding of postwar African American literary history. Cloutier combines his own experiences as a researcher and archivist with a theoretically rich account of the archive to offer a pioneering study of the importance of African American authors’ archival practices and how these shaped their writing. Given the lack of institutions dedicated to the black experience, the novel became an alternative site of historical preservation, a means to ensure both individual legacy and group survival. Such archivism manifests in the work of these authors through evolving lifecycles where documents undergo repurposing, revision, insertion, falsification, transformation, and fictionalization, sometimes across decades. An innovative interdisciplinary consideration of literary papers, Shadow Archives proposes new ways for literary scholars to engage with the archive.

Jack Kerouac has long been mythologized as an all-American figure: the “King of the Beats,” forever hitchhiking on the road, who gave voice to a postwar generation of rebels. In fact, he was born Jean-Louis Kérouac to immigrant parents from Québec and was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. Throughout his career, Kerouac not only secretly composed French manuscripts but also served as a self-translator to negotiate between French and English. In his bilingual journals, Kerouac lamented the wounds of assimilation and what he called the impossibility of living in French in the United States.Big American Writer recasts Jack Kerouac as an ethnic, bilingual author, demonstrating that his French Canadian upbringing and background were formative to his breakthrough literary achievements. Building on years of archival excavation, Jean-Christophe Cloutier demystifies the Beat writer’s complex compositional practices and techniques of self-translation. He reveals that Kerouac pioneered new ways of capturing the orality of North American French in his manuscripts and invented the “Spontaneous Prose Method” in part as a reaction to his thwarted hope to live in French. Reading Kerouac’s secret French manuscripts and multilingual prose poem Old Angel Midnight alongside well-known works such as On the Road, Cloutier demonstrates how Kerouac’s writing engages with the complexity of ethnic identity in the United States. Offering a new lens on an often-misunderstood figure, Big American Writer shows why Kerouac’s bilingualism changes how we understand his place in North American literature.

Jack Kerouac has long been mythologized as an all-American figure: the “King of the Beats,” forever hitchhiking on the road, who gave voice to a postwar generation of rebels. In fact, he was born Jean-Louis Kérouac to immigrant parents from Québec and was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. Throughout his career, Kerouac not only secretly composed French manuscripts but also served as a self-translator to negotiate between French and English. In his bilingual journals, Kerouac lamented the wounds of assimilation and what he called the impossibility of living in French in the United States.Big American Writer recasts Jack Kerouac as an ethnic, bilingual author, demonstrating that his French Canadian upbringing and background were formative to his breakthrough literary achievements. Building on years of archival excavation, Jean-Christophe Cloutier demystifies the Beat writer’s complex compositional practices and techniques of self-translation. He reveals that Kerouac pioneered new ways of capturing the orality of North American French in his manuscripts and invented the “Spontaneous Prose Method” in part as a reaction to his thwarted hope to live in French. Reading Kerouac’s secret French manuscripts and multilingual prose poem Old Angel Midnight alongside well-known works such as On the Road, Cloutier demonstrates how Kerouac’s writing engages with the complexity of ethnic identity in the United States. Offering a new lens on an often-misunderstood figure, Big American Writer shows why Kerouac’s bilingualism changes how we understand his place in North American literature.

Recasting the history of African American literature, Shadow Archives brings to life a slew of newly discovered texts—including Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth—to tell the stories of black special collections and their struggle for institutional recognition. Jean-Christophe Cloutier offers revelatory readings of major African American writers, including McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison, and provides a nuanced view of how archival methodology, access, and the power dynamics of acquisitions shape literary history.Shadow Archives argues that the notion of the archive is crucial to our understanding of postwar African American literary history. Cloutier combines his own experiences as a researcher and archivist with a theoretically rich account of the archive to offer a pioneering study of the importance of African American authors’ archival practices and how these shaped their writing. Given the lack of institutions dedicated to the black experience, the novel became an alternative site of historical preservation, a means to ensure both individual legacy and group survival. Such archivism manifests in the work of these authors through evolving lifecycles where documents undergo repurposing, revision, insertion, falsification, transformation, and fictionalization, sometimes across decades. An innovative interdisciplinary consideration of literary papers, Shadow Archives proposes new ways for literary scholars to engage with the archive.

Recasting the history of African American literature, Shadow Archives brings to life a slew of newly discovered texts—including Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth—to tell the stories of black special collections and their struggle for institutional recognition. Jean-Christophe Cloutier offers revelatory readings of major African American writers, including McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison, and provides a nuanced view of how archival methodology, access, and the power dynamics of acquisitions shape literary history.Shadow Archives argues that the notion of the archive is crucial to our understanding of postwar African American literary history. Cloutier combines his own experiences as a researcher and archivist with a theoretically rich account of the archive to offer a pioneering study of the importance of African American authors’ archival practices and how these shaped their writing. Given the lack of institutions dedicated to the black experience, the novel became an alternative site of historical preservation, a means to ensure both individual legacy and group survival. Such archivism manifests in the work of these authors through evolving lifecycles where documents undergo repurposing, revision, insertion, falsification, transformation, and fictionalization, sometimes across decades. An innovative interdisciplinary consideration of literary papers, Shadow Archives proposes new ways for literary scholars to engage with the archive.

Jack Kerouac has long been mythologized as an all-American figure: the “King of the Beats,” forever hitchhiking on the road, who gave voice to a postwar generation of rebels. In fact, he was born Jean-Louis Kérouac to immigrant parents from Québec and was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. Throughout his career, Kerouac not only secretly composed French manuscripts but also served as a self-translator to negotiate between French and English. In his bilingual journals, Kerouac lamented the wounds of assimilation and what he called the impossibility of living in French in the United States.Big American Writer recasts Jack Kerouac as an ethnic, bilingual author, demonstrating that his French Canadian upbringing and background were formative to his breakthrough literary achievements. Building on years of archival excavation, Jean-Christophe Cloutier demystifies the Beat writer’s complex compositional practices and techniques of self-translation. He reveals that Kerouac pioneered new ways of capturing the orality of North American French in his manuscripts and invented the “Spontaneous Prose Method” in part as a reaction to his thwarted hope to live in French. Reading Kerouac’s secret French manuscripts and multilingual prose poem Old Angel Midnight alongside well-known works such as On the Road, Cloutier demonstrates how Kerouac’s writing engages with the complexity of ethnic identity in the United States. Offering a new lens on an often-misunderstood figure, Big American Writer shows why Kerouac’s bilingualism changes how we understand his place in North American literature.