New Kerouac: Editors engage

Fresh insights into 2025 title

JACK KEROUAC, three years after his Centenary was widely commemorated in the Beat community, remains a figure of huge interest to both the academic sector and a general readership both in the US and internationally. In the last 12 months a significant number of new titles focusing on the author have been added to the bookshelves.

The latest is Rethinking Kerouac: Afterlives, Continuities, Reappraisals, released by Bloomsbury this very month and reviewed for Rock and the Beat Generation by Jonah Raskin at the start of the year. We are now pleased to interview the book’s co-editors – Erik Mortenson and Tomasz Sawczuk – about an exciting addition to the catalogue.

Erik Mortenson is a Faculty Member in English at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor, Michigan. His scholarly work focuses on American literary and visual texts and their intersection with cultural concerns, with an emphasis on the Beat Generation. He has contributed book chapters in volumes such as The Cambridge Companion to the Beats and The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature.

He is the author of three monographs: Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence (2011), which examines ‘the moment’ as one of the primary motifs of Beat writing; Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (2016), investigateing the role shadows play in Cold War literary and popular texts, looking specifically at Beat poetry, postwar photography, film noir; and Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey (2018), exploring how the Beats have been received in Turkey as ‘underground literature’.

He has also published the edited volume The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation (2023), co-edited with Tony Trigilio, and is currently editing the forthcoming Allen Ginsberg in Context (2026) for Cambridge University Press.

Tomasz Sawczuk is Assistant Professor at University of Bialystok, Poland. In 2022 he was a Visiting Research Scholar at Fordham University in the US. Among his publications on Beat writers, American literature, 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). In 2024, he served as the Head of the Organizing Committee for the annual European Beat Studies Network conference. Sawczuk’s current academic focus is on North-American concrete poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

Simon Warner: What do you see as the principal aim of this collection?

Erik Mortenson & Tomasz Sawczuk: The idea of Rethinking Kerouac is to offer all readers – scholars and enthusiasts alike – a range of new ‘takes’ on this perennially fascinating writer. The coverage is wide, from early works that don’t always get much discussion, to the ‘classic’ texts, to later works which have sort of fallen off the critical radar. It also examines Kerouac’s work more broadly, looking at his paintings, his poetry, and even his seldom-discussed screenwriting.

And this ‘rethinking’ extends to Kerouac the public figure, looking at how his work is appropriated in music, literature, and on the screen. Equally important is assessing Kerouac’s global iconicity, the appeal and relevance of his writing as well as the cultural legacy he left behind.

Our hope for the volume is that it opens a host of new ways of thinking about Kerouac and his work that are both critically informed and engagingly fresh, offering a book that bridges the gap between academic and non-academic readers of Kerouac.

SW: Did it arise in part out of the interest raised by the Jack Kerouac Centenary in 2022?

EM & TS: Indeed, the initial impulse came from a desire to mark the Centenary and celebrate Kerouac’s enduring influence on literary landscapes in America and worldwide. Over time, it became increasingly clear that the current cultural moment called for a reassessment – one that moves beyond mere homage to critically engage with paradoxes inherent in Kerouac’s life and work.

SW: Are there still new angles to be explored in the case of this writer?

EM & TS: Certainly! As this collection hopefully demonstrates, there is still much to examine regarding Kerouac’s writing and its intersections with race, gender, and class, among other approaches. The ways Kerouac mixes and negotiates cultural codes deserve attention that we feel the book provides.

We were also fortunate to collaborate with Kerouac experts who delved into the writer’s less explored ventures in non-fiction, poetry, painting, and screenwriting. With Kerouac, there is always something new to explore. For example, one thing that came up repeatedly during the editing of this book was Kerouac’s relationship to the digital. We hadn’t really thought about that, given Kerouac’s interest in spontaneity.

But several contributors discuss Ross Goodwin’s 1 the Road, a novel which reimagines Kerouac’s road trips virtually. Given the present interest in AI, such comparisons warrant further consideration, and ‘rethinking’ Kerouac’s sense of community in our present digital age is intriguing.

We also think there is more to say on reception. Kerouac is still an internationally known figure, which fascinates us, and the last chapter of the book is an interview we conduct with three of Kerouac’s translators. Why do readers continually return to Kerouac? What might he have to offer us into the twenty-first century, across the globe? These are important questions that deserve further investigation.

SW: Is Kerouac’s reputation secure in 2025?

EM & TS: This is a tricky one, but we believe it is. Kerouac’s work certainly raises problems in terms of its misogyny and occasional naïve racism. As critics, we would do well to meet these issues head on, as such criticism is indeed legitimate, and ignoring these fraught issues is not a long-term solution.

But we think it is also true that Kerouac will always appeal to readers looking for innovative work that questions the status quo. Kerouac offers a rawness and soulful vulnerability. Readers are invited to grapple with the full weight of his complexities, as a sort of Rorschach test, offering an opportunity to self-reflect and see what exactly Kerouac’s work means to them today. We believe he will be continually rediscovered, which means his work will live on, as long as there are discontented young readers out there. Thus, his work should remain relevant for some time to come!

SW: Where do you feel the field of Kerouac Studies is headed over the next few years?

EM & TS:: The great thing about Kerouac is that there is always more to explore. His work opens up any number of directions worthy of further investigation. Rethinking Kerouac attempts to offer what we hope are fruitful possibilities for this fascinating writer going forward.

There remains much to examine concerning the multinational and multicultural Kerouac as well as the writer’s archival inclinations and practices. His global reception and the dynamics of his fandom also offer fertile ground for further study.

We would love to see more work on the performative aspects of his art as well as on how Kerouac’s works and his iconic status are mediated through other media, be it film, video games or artists’ books. Any of the essays in this volume could easily be expanded upon – there is a lot more to say on all these topics. The future of Kerouac Studies is bright, in our opinion.

See also: Book review #37: Rethinking Kerouac, January 2nd, 2025