Jack Kerouac has long been mythologized as an all-American figure: the “King of the Beats,” forever hitchhiking on the road, who gave voice to a postwar generation of rebels. In fact, he was born Jean-Louis Kérouac to immigrant parents from Québec and was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. Throughout his career, Kerouac not only secretly composed French manuscripts but also served as a self-translator to negotiate between French and English. In his bilingual journals, Kerouac lamented the wounds of assimilation and what he called the impossibility of living in French in the United States.

Big American Writer recasts Jack Kerouac as an ethnic, bilingual author, demonstrating that his French Canadian upbringing and background were formative to his breakthrough literary achievements. Building on years of archival excavation, Jean-Christophe Cloutier demystifies the Beat writer’s complex compositional practices and techniques of self-translation. He reveals that Kerouac pioneered new ways of capturing the orality of North American French in his manuscripts and invented the “Spontaneous Prose Method” in part as a reaction to his thwarted hope to live in French. Reading Kerouac’s secret French manuscripts and multilingual prose poem Old Angel Midnight alongside well-known works such as On the Road, Cloutier demonstrates how Kerouac’s writing engages with the complexity of ethnic identity in the United States. Offering a new lens on an often-misunderstood figure, Big American Writer shows why Kerouac’s bilingualism changes how we understand his place in North American literature.

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature and editor of Kerouac’s La vie est d’hommage and Sur le chemin. He also translated two of Kerouac’s French manuscripts for The Unknown Kerouac from the Library of America.