A few years back the indefatigable Douglas Brinkley edited and introduced the 1947-1954 journals of Jack Kerouac and put them before us as Windblown World (Viking, 2004).
Reading Windblown World reminded me of John Ciardi's "Epitaph for the Dead Beats" (Saturday Review, February 6, 1960), an excellent if unsympathetic piece of culture critique which I dug out and re-read. Here is the put-down directed at Kerouac's 'spontaneous prose':
Whether or not Jack Kerouac has traces of a talent, he remains basically a high school athlete who went from Lowell, Massachusetts to Skid Row, losing his eraser en route.
In a similar vein there is the quip of Truman Capote: "That's not writing, it's typewriting!"
But Jack's sweet gone shade has had the last laugh. Whatever one thinks of Kerouac's influence, he has altered the culture. But Ciardi? I'll bet you've never heard of him __ until now.