The secondary sources used in this project were not only focused on Jack Kerouac and the correspondence he maintained with Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, but also on his connections within the Beat movement. These sources range from how Kerouac interpreted Buddhism in relation to his personal life traumas. Specifically he tried to contextualize the death of his late older brother with the Buddhist tenets of human suffering. More broadly, these sources situate Kerouac in the larger debate about the role of spirituality taking place during the mid-1950s amongst Buddhist communities in the United States.
Brown, James. “The Zen of Anarchy: Japanese Exceptionalism and the Anarchist Roots of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance.” Religion and American Culture 19, no. 2 (2009): 207–242.
Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Biography. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973.
Clark, Tom. Jack Kerouac: A Biography. New York: Marlowe, 1984.
Coupe, Laurence. Beat Sound, Beat Vision: The Beat Spirit and Popular Song. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012.
Forsberg, Jennifer H. “A Jack‐of‐All‐Trades’: Jack Kerouac’s Fashionable Practice of Working‐Class Drag.” Journal of Popular Culture 50, no. 6 (2017): 1213–1229.
Garton-Gundling, Kyle. Enlightened Individualism: Buddhism and Hinduism in American Literature from the Beats to the Present. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019.
Giamo, Benedict. “Enlightened Attachment: Kerouac’s Impermanent Buddhist Trek.” Religion & Literature 35, no. 2/3 (2003): 173–206.
Haynes, Sarah F. “Sad Paradise: Jack Kerouac’s Nostalgic Buddhism.” Religions 10, no. 4 (2019): 266-277.
Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. New York: Penguin Books, 1976.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin Books, 1976.
Lord, Sterling. “When Kerouac Met Kesey.” American Scholar 80, no. 4 (September 2011): 110–13.
Masatsugu, Michael K. “‘Beyond This World of Transiency and Impermanence’: Japanese Americans, Dharma Bums, and the Making of American Buddhism During the Early Cold War Years.” Pacific Historical Review 77, no. 3 (2008): 423–451.
Phillips, Rod. “Forest Beatniks” and “Urban Thoreaus”: Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Lew Welch, and Michael McClure. Vol. 22. New York: P. Lang, 2000.
Snyder, Gary. Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. New York: Counterpoint, 2010.
Stewart, David. On the Road to Desolation. United Kingdom: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1997.
Suiter, John. Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen & Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades. Washington, D.C: Counterpoint, 2002.
Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.
Tytell, John. Naked Angels: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991.
Watts, Alan. The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work and Art in the Far East. New York: Grove Press, 1958.