Regina Weinreich explores Kerouac’s place in American literature by establishing the total design of his work. She contends that he thought of his works as “one vast book” (a “Divine Comedy of Buddha”) he called the Legend of Duluoz.
Weinreich finds that Kerouac’s linguistic experimentation leads to a poetic unity rather than the linear unity commonly associated with legends. She discusses the nature of his “spontaneous bop prosody,” relating it to the work of Thomas Wolfe and Henry Miller.
In addition to explaining Kerouac’s method, Weinreich seeks to define the unity of his works, from The Town and the City, On the Road, and Visions of Cody to Desolation Angels and Vanity of Duluoz, which she argues brings the legend full circle. Weinreich feels the autobiographical nature of Kerouac’s oeuvre links him to other twentieth-century American writers, following a distinctly Whitmanesque tradition.
