The Beatnik Legacy

Although Kerouac separated himself from the Beats during his life, and even said "I'm not a Beat. I'm a Catholic," he embodies the movement through his literature and how he is remembered in death. Figures such as Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg commemorate him and help to keep his legacy alive. Kerouac once described the Beats as follows: 

"[it began] In the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way--a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word 'beat' spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America--beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction"

This conviction lead the Beats to engage in spiritual quests and having "flashes of insight" through means of traveling, adventure, writing, and meditation. Stephen Prothero, a literary critic, frames his argument throughout his piece "On the Holy Road: The Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest" by explaining the two 
interpretive lines surrounding the Beat movement: the first is a tendency to view the movement rather narrowly, while the second is an impulse to judge that impulse negatively. What consistently bothered critics the most about the Beats was their ‘negativity’. They were believed to be at war with sacred American ideals during the Eisenhower era. Nowadays, Beat literature is edging its way into the American literary canon. Prothero wants to propel this recognition forward: he suggests that it should have a prominent place in both American religious and literary history. The Beats were, he believes, spiritual protesters and literary innovators who through writing are “understanding and explicating the private hells of those who remained on the margins of postwar prosperity.” The Beats are not monotheistic; Kerouac, though raised Catholic, explored Buddhism. We see this exploration in several of his works, including Dharma Bums. Gary Snyder, a mountain poet and Zen initiative, is immortalized in Kerouac’s pages as Japhy Ryder. This commitment to a spiritual search is described as “liberating” for the beats, as it “empowered them to deny absolute reality of material world even as they affirmed spiritual experiences in it” (216). Kerouac and his fellow Beats, for these reasons, deserve to be studied among the ranks of the Transcendentalists, Thoreau, Emerson, and their likenesses. 

Prothero links this spiritual exploration with Kerouac’s nomadic lifestyle, writing that “They went on the road because they could not find God in the churches and synagogues of post-war America” (217). Kerouac, in his writing, seesaws between the material and the spiritual and documents his insights like not many others have.