Voices of Their Generation: Jack Kerouac and Ernest Hemingway
This essay explores Ernest Hemingway’s influence on the young Jack Kerouac. Like many aspiring writers during the 1940s, Kerouac read Hemingway’s novels and short stories. With Hemingway’s comeback novel For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940, he remained an influential figure on the American literary scene. When Kerouac set out to find his own literary voice, he abandoned Hemingway’s style of realism. Yet in later years, while struggling with ill-effects of fame and alcoholism, Kerouac often identified with Hemingway and longed to join him as one of the celebrated modern writers of American literature.
By John Cohassey
13-page essay