CITY LIGHTS LIVE ! Kerouac @100
An appreciation of Jack Kerouac’s unique contribution to American literature with talks by Ann Charters, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Ann Douglas, Tim Hunt, Joyce Johnson, Hassan Melehy and Regina Weinreich, readings by Tony Torn, and a birthday greeting by David Amram. Hosted by Peter Maravelis of City Lights.
On Thursday, March 10, 2022, City Lights, at the birthplace of the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat movement, celebrated Jack Kerouac’s centenary, with an illuminating exploration of his writing. Moving beyond the hype and fetishization of his personality, some of the country's leading Kerouac scholars take a deep dive into his work. Learn about books you haven’t yet read, his innovations in prose, the influence of his Franco-American background and how he discovered his unique voice.
City Light features one of the largest selection of Jack Kerouac books in the world. Check out our stock at this link:
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About the participants:
David Amram is a composer, arranger, and conductor of orchestral, chamber, and choral works. He was a friend of Jack Kerouac's. In 1957, they collaborated together on New York’s first jazz poetry reading with David playing his French horn. The following year David appeared in the iconic Robert Frank/Kerouac film, Pull My Daisy, and contributed the title song.
Ann Charters is professor of American Literature at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. She is a Jack Kerouac and Beat Generation scholar. Professor Charters worked with Jack Kerouac to compile his bibliography and was the only biographer who had access to Kerouac and interviewed him about the circumstances in which he wrote his books. She edited Jack Kerouac’s posthumous poetry collection "Scattered Poems." She is also the editor of numerous volumes on Beat and 1960s American literature, including The Portable Beat Reader, The Portable Sixties Reader, Beat Down To Your Soul, The Portable Jack Kerouac, and in 2010 Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation, which she co-authored with her husband.
Jean-Christophe Cloutier is associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the editor of "La vie est d’hommage", which gathers the original French writings of Jack Kerouac, and he also translated into English two of Kerouac’s French novels for the Library of America’s The Unknown Kerouac. He is currently completing an extensive study of Kerouac’s oeuvre that explores the writer’s practices as a novelist, translator, and archivist
Ann Douglas has been teaching courses on the Beats since the 1990s. The author of two books on American culture, she has written extensively on Kerouac for the NYT, The Nation and several academic periodicals, as well as writing introductions for Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters. She is currently Parr Professor of Comparative Literature emerita at Columbia and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Tim Hunt is the author of Kerouac’s "Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction" and "The Textuality of Soulwork: Kerouac’s Quest for Spontaneous Prose." He has published four collections of Poetry.
Joyce Johnson, who proposed and put together this celebration of Kerouac’s work, was with him in 1957 at the age of 21, when On the Road was published. She has written eight books, three of them novels. Her writings on Jack include her memoir Minor Characters, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983; Door Wide Open: A Beat Memoir in Letters (2000);and her 2012 biography of Jack, The Voice Is All:The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. As an editor, she was responsible for bringing out Visions of Cody, the book Jack considered his masterpiece, in 1972.
Hassan Melehy teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory (2016), the first book-length study of Kerouac’s French-language heritage and its large role in his writing. Melehy has written several other books about French and English literature and philosophy. He is also a poet: his first collection, A Modest Apocalypse, was published in 2017.
Tony Torn is an actor and director based in New York. His more than 100 stage and screen credits. He directed "Door Wide Open", Joyce Johnson’s dramatization of her published correspondence with Jack Kerouac. He manages Torn Page, a private event space dedicated to his parents Rip Torn and Geraldine Page.
Regina Weinreich, a filmmaker and widely published culture critic, is the author of Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics (1987), one of the earliest full-scale critical studies of Jack Kerouac’s literary work. She edited and compiled Kerouac’s Book of Haikus and wrote the introduction to Kerouac’s You’re a Genius All the Time.
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