Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination explores Kerouac's fiction, poetry, religious writing, private journals, and correspondence as literary texts revealing his aesthetic vision for American belle letters. The vision encompasses his fictional rewriting of his personal history, his life-long quest for spiritual enlightenment - both Christian and Buddhist - and his resolute belief in the blending of popular and academic cultural artifacts to create voices and forms that speak of and to a new age. The book features chapters on Some of the Dharma, Doctor Sax, On the Road, Desolation Angels, and Mexico City Blues.