Reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men again. Everyone should.
Kerouac is still a literary god. Them that influenced him, Thomas Wolfe and James Agee, have fallen away. Look Homeward Angel and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men set Kerouac alight. The prose, short on punctuation and long on description and adjectives, obviously attracted the young writer. Benzedrine and alcohol and cigarettes completed the package.
We know Jack idolized Wolfe. He went on a brief, drunken pilgrimage to Wolfe's home, but found his brother instead. There is nothing written about Kerouac emulating or admiring Agee. However, reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men you get the feeling that Agee is filling up the car, Dean Moriarty, cracking wise, seated in the backseat, young and sneering.
They all inhabited a different, raw, precocious, simpler time. A moment when the American frontier was split asunder by Route 66 and young men returned home from war, changed and bound for change. Questioning and building. America, founded on words, ripe for a new definition in the decades to come -- shook and stirred and bled by words. America on the road, few stationary, some howling.
