The Breton Traveller
Jack Kerouac’s Search for his Roots Much has been written about Kerouac’s apparent...
Read More
Category: Essays
Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Gerard
By Kristin McLaughlin Without Gerard, what would have happened to Ti Jean? – Jack Kerouac[1] Visions of Gerard is Kerouac’s prolonged meditation on his older, saintly brother Gerard, who died at the age of nine (Jack was four at...
Read More
Alene Lee – Subterranean Muse
by Steven O’Sullivan Alene Lee is the real name of The Subterraneans’ Mardou Fox, and of...
Read MoreKerouac and the Outsider – A Puzzle
by Dave Moore It was Horst who started it. Horst Spandler has been translating the 1971 Kerouac anthology Scattered Poems into German. Along the way he’s been asking others their advice on the meaning of parts of Jack’s poems....
Read MoreVisions of Vollmer
by David S. Wills In Issue Two of Beatdom, we ran a story about the women of the Beat Generation, and we obviously talked a little about Joan Vollmer. However, we didn’t say enough to do her justice, for she was a fascinating...
Read More
The Beats & Sixties Counterculture
The 1960s are associated with what Frank calls ‘the big change, the birthplace of our own culture,...
Read MoreHunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac and Ernest Hemingway Review No Country for Old Men
by Matt Gibson Hunter S. Thompson The theatre was dark and reeked with the stench of a hundred overfed accountants gorging on chemical drenched popcorn and syrup water. I’d been assigned to review No Country for Old Men for...
Read MoreHunter S. Thompson & the Beats
Note: This essay was hugely expanded in 2020. The new version is found here. Hunter S. Thompson was no Beatnik. For one thing, he was too late. By the time he was knocking out Gonzo journalism, Kerouac had died, the hippies had...
Read More
Find Beatdom on Amazon
