ABSTRACT
Flying from New York to Louisville in February 2001 for a forty-eight-hour 'Insomniacathon', produced by poet extraordinaire, teacher, and keeper of the Jack Kerouac spirit flame Ron Whitehead, the author sat across the aisle from a young rapper. Jack Kerouac's books were never promoted during his lifetime, after On the Road. Most people his age still do not regard him that highly. Those early savage criticisms were written by people who felt a successful man of letters should write and act in a certain prescribed way. In the author's first session he told a bunch of young people of high school to college age that Jack had loved Southern culture, and that he had identified the influences of the King James Bible's flowing rhythms of speech and Shakespeare's stately poetic dramatic monologues on the writers of New England and the South.
