![]() Snyder introduced Kerouac to Buddhism, and much of this novel is dedicated to the interesting, if incongruous, mixture of eastern philosophy and their Bohemian lifestyle. In The Dharma Bums, Ray Smith is Kerouac and Japhy Ryder is his friend, Beat writer Gary Snyder. Kerouac used pseudonyms throughout his work, sometimes comically thin disguises for his real-world friends and acquaintances. ![]() It’s raucous, unpredictable, and there is much fun to be had. A loose, spontaneous movement from place to place and scene to scene that feels more about the energy and some of the ideas than anything that would be called a plot. A lot of sex and drugs and hanging out and writing. It picks up many of the threads of On the Road. Keroac wrote The Dharma Bums in November of 1957, just as his star was becoming bright. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was on trial for obscenity in 1957, so the editors of On the Road required that much of the sex and drugs be toned down so as not to meet the same fate. ![]() The Beats were their new favorite target. ![]() And the cultural Puritans came at it with the same fervor they come at every generation’s artistic rabble rousers. Upon the publication of On the Road in September of 1957, Gillbert Millstein of the New York Times dubbed Jack Kerouac the “principal avatar” of the Beat Generation, and that book the “clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation.” To other literary critics, it was all style and no substance. ![]()
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