October is Kerouac month hereabouts, but aficionados will want to read the recent Football and the Fall of Jack Kerouac, a New Yorker piece that raises the question of the contribution of football-induced brain trauma to Kerouac's decline and early death.
In The New Criterion, Bruce Bawer lays into Kerouac's poetry with some justification:
Grimly reconciled though one may be to the annual flood of books by and about the Beat Generation, it’s particularly depressing to see Jack Kerouac’s poetry, of all things, enshrined in the Library of America, that magnificent series designed to preserve for posterity the treasures of our national literature. To read through these seven hundred–odd pages of Kerouac’s staggeringly slapdash effusions set in elegant Galliard, outfitted with the usual meticulous editorial apparatus, and bound—like Twain’s novels and Lincoln’s speeches—in a beautiful Library of America volume is enough to trigger a serious attack of cognitive dissonance.
David Ulin of the L. A. Times responds to Bawer.