Thursday, October 11, 2012

You Don’t Know Jack: Kerouac Biographer Joyce Johnson and ‘The Voice Is All’ - The Daily Beast:
Finally, after years of suppressing his French-Canadian lineage in his writing, Kerouac experimented with writing openly about his Franco-American heritage in the blunt, plainspoken joual of his youth. This experiment in his native language, which occurred shortly before he sat down to write On the Road,gave his writing a certain intimacy. “It was a very direct first-person voice,” said Johnson, “frank and open—not the self-conscious literary voice he was using before. It was a voice that would lure an ardent legion of Kerouac disciples for decades to come, with unremitting lines that build momentum like freight trains:

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