The Norman Mailer-Jack Kerouac Thing Settled at Last

May 18, 1960, Vol. V, No. 30

By Alfred G. Aronowitz

The idea that Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer are mutually excludable from each other's Beat Generation is, of course, one that is engendered by and subject to many doubts. Now, however, Seymour Krim dispels the idea entirely. At least, he finds both Kerouac and Mailer mutually ineludable in his Beat Generation, which he defines in broad proportions in his new anthology, "The Beats." But actually Kerouac and Mailer have long been literary brothers, even if under each other's skin. Which one founded the Beat Generation and which one merely found it is just a matter of semantics. Kerouac named it Beat and Mailer calls it Hip, but both have been equally perceptive and outspoken in their presagement, reporting, and defense of it, if not equally maligned...

Kerouac went on the road to discover that the Beatness he had encountered in New York was what the less ethereally inclined would call a trend. He found it everywhere that his thumb and various other vehicles would take him, and the distances he traveled are well documented. Kerouac's discovery of the Beat Generation was at a grass-roots level, a term that seems strangely compatible with trend.

As for Mailer, although his research probably was no less empirical, it seems to have been at other levels. Perhaps it might be concluded that, in one way, Mailer found in his own mind what Kerouac found throughout America...

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