R.J. Ellis, Visiting Professor, the University of Chichester
This short intervention, or squib, considers the way in which a newly-emerged piece of writing seemingly signed by Kerouac raises questions about Kerouac’s oeuvre and how this new piece can be understood within the processes by which Kerouac’s writing is mythologised. If you fancy imposing a spoiler on yourself, read the “Coda” to this squib first, before digesting what now follows.
The discovery of The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing, a short, previously unknown two-page piece by Jack Kerouac dated 15 April 1957 [probably inaccurately], is of considerable literary and cultural significance. Emerging from the height of Kerouac’s creative period—the same year On the Road was published—it offers a rare glimpse into the author’s evolving consciousness at a time when he was both defining and being defined by the Beat Generation. The brevity of the piece suggests a distilled experiment in style or theme, perhaps an embryonic form of ideas that would later surface more fully in works like The Dharma Bums or Desolation Angels. Its subtitle, “a brief tale,” may even signal Kerouac’s own awareness of the fragmentary, improvisational form he often celebrated, mirroring his spontaneous prose technique and his search for transcendence in fleeting, ecstatic moments.
Critically, the find invites re-evaluation of Kerouac’s reputation as a writer whose brilliance was bound to long, free-flowing novels. If the piece demonstrates his capacity to compress the Beat ethos—spiritual yearning, alienation, and ecstatic rebellion—into a short narrative, it could broaden understanding of his range and discipline. Moreover, the timing of the manuscript places it at a transitional point between Kerouac’s early romanticism and his later spiritual disillusionment. Whether the “next thing” of the title refers to artistic renewal, religious revelation, or simply the restless motion that characterises Beat life, the story’s rediscovery revives questions about the limits of Kerouac’s experimentation and the continued resonance of his mythos in American literature.
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I trust you did not think the last two paragraphs were anything but an AI generated “short critical review” of the discovery of “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing”. I want to consider what this AI response tells us about how Kerouac is generally perceived online and what the shortcomings of this all too easy perception are – both in the popular imagination and (to a lesser degree—and I’d like to be able to say, a far less degree) in critical studies. Finally, and also, I want to assess the status of “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing.”
I do not intend to launch out on a full-scale analysis of the many shortcomings and misapprehensions of this AI “critical review” (which is what I asked the AI to supply). But to take just one simple example before I set out: prior to the putative composition of “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing” in 1957, Kerouac’s earlier writing is poorly characterized as consisting of “long … novels”, and much of it had been far from free-flowing, rather being demandingly experimental. Instead of labouring these sort of points, I want to develop a few others that I think emerge from what was AI’s very early response (made on 20 October 2025) to the discovery or “emergence” of “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing” and the ever-ready preparedness of AI to undertake such a task.
First let me say that “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing”, if it was truly composed in 1957, would have been written at a time really quite late on in the cascade of writing that Kerouac launched upon in the period 1948 to 1958 (roughly speaking). It is doubtful, then, that this piece was composed at the time of a “height” in a “creative period”. Rather it would have been composed at a time when Kerouac was retreating from the experimentalism to be found in his work on Visions of Cody (during 1950-52), in Mexico City Blues and his other “Books of Blues” (during 1955 and ff.), in Old Angel Midnight (during 1956 and 1959), in parts of the scroll version of On the Road (1951), in much of Doctor Sax (during 1948-52), in parts of Tristessa (during 1955-56) and also in parts of Maggie Cassidy (1952-53), in parts of The Subterraneans (1953) and in segments of the opening few short sections of Desolation Angels (1956).[1] But this period was also marked by a retreat from the commitment Kerouac claimed he sustained by writing directly and unreservedly about his life, in an intensely autobiographical fashion. (he would later speak of this process as spontaneous though this label is misleading)[2]
Let me briefly back this double claim up. It is quite easily done by closely looking at the changes made to the 1951 scroll version of On the Road before the novel’s publication in 1957, ones perhaps influenced by the inputs of Kerouac’s editors, Helen Weaver and Malcolm Cowley (less so). I will pick out just two such changes. Firstly, in the opening pages:
… Dean … already had a new parkinglot job in New York—he leaned over my shoulder as I typed rapidly away and said “Come on man, those girls won’t wait, make it fast,” and I said “Hold on just a minute, I’ll be right with you soon as I finish this chapter,” and it was one of the best chapters in the whole book, Then I dressed and off we flew to NY to meet some girls. As you know to go from Ozone Park to New York takes an hour by elevated and subway, and as we rode in the El over the rooftops of Brooklyn we leaned on each other with fingers waving and yelling and talked excitedly and I was beginning to get the bug like Neal. In all, what Neal was, simply, was tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con man he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and also to get involved with people that would otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me, so called, and I knew it, and he knew I knew (this has been the basis of our relation) but I didn’t care and we got along fine. I began to learn from him as much as he probably learned from me. As far as my work was concerned he said, “Go ahead, everything you do is great.” We went to New York, I forget what the situation was, two girls—there were no girls there, they were supposed to meet him or some such thing and they weren’t there. We went to his parking lot where he had a few things to do—change his clothes in the shack and spruce up a bit in front of a cracked shack mirror and so on, and then we took off. And that was the night Neal met … Allen Ginsberg. (OS: 111-112)
becomes in the 1957 On the Road:
Dean … already had the parking-lot job in New York—he leaned over my shoulder as I typed rapidly way and said, “Come on, man, those girls won’t wait, make it fast.”
I said, “Hold on a minute, I’ll be right with you as soon as I finish this chapter,” and it was one of the best chapters in the book. Then I dressed and off we flew to New York to meet some girls. As we rode the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each other with fingers waving and yelling and talking excitedly and I was beginning to get the bug like Dean. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it (for room and board and ‘how-to-write’, etc.) and he knew I knew (this has been the basis of our relationship), but I didn’t care and we got along fine—no pestering, no catering [sic]; we tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends. I began to learn from him as much as he probably learned from me. As far as my work was concerned he said, “Go ahead, everything you do is great.” He watched over my shoulder as I wrote stories, yelling, “Yes! That’s right! Wow! Man!” and “Phew!” and wiped his face with his handkerchief. “Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary ambitions and grammatical fears …”
“That’s right, man, now you’re talking.” And a kind of holy lightning I saw flashing from his excitement and his visions, which he described so torrentially that people on buses looked around to see the ‘over-excited nut’. In the West he’d spent a third of his time in the poolhall, a third in jail, and a third in the public library. They’d seen him rushing eagerly down the winter streets, bareheaded, carrying books to the poolhall, or climbing trees to get to the attics of buddies where he spent days reading or hiding from the law.
We went to New York—I forget what the situation was, two colored girls—there were no girls there; they were supposed to meet him in a diner and they didn’t show up. And that was the night Dean met Carlo Marx. (OTR 6-7)
The extensive changes and additions between scroll and novel made here are significant. Only a few simple multisyllabic words exists in the scroll version; multiple ones crop up in the passage in the 1957 book, in which more long sentences occur. The passage in the book spells out what the scroll version allows to emerge organically in its unfolding of the story. Overall the representation has assumed (ironically, given these lines’ comments on how Kerouac wrote) a greater discursive literariness, cutting out the touch of intimacy introduced by the phrase “As you know”. It also introduces slightly more of a degree of censoriousness about Neal/Dean—very early on in the book (which means Neal Cassady’s famous antipathy concerning his portrait becomes more fully comprehensible). And romantic, recurrently elegiac dithyrambs are tightening their grip on the prose (via such words as phosphorescence, heartbreaking, visions, holy lightning, torrentially )—a trend that becomes quite apparent as the 1957 novel unfolds. Perhaps above all the fact-sharp directness found in an apprentice piece written with Burroughs and partly learned from Burroughs—And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks—has become more heavily diluted.[3]
This is even more apparent in Kerouac’s production of a replacement ending to the novel—the one replacing the ending of the scroll, after that was (famously) eaten by a spaniel owned by Lucien Carr, as Kerouac carefully noted:
… ambulances merely come through at eighty miles an hour in the city streets and everybody has to get out of the way, and it does not pause for an instant DOG ATE (Potchky – a dog) (OS, 408)[4]
In the 1957 novel this depiction of a careening Mexico City ambulance is followed by over seven pages providing a replacement ending, including the introduction of a sub-division making “PART FIVE” (p. 316). What I am most concerned with here, however, is the final paragraph:
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. (OTR 309-10)
Dithyrambic notes of elegiac lament now dominate. Tellingly, this closing passage is presented as a “quotable quote” by goodreadcoms.[5] I detect a faint, sentimentalised echo of The Great Gatsby’s close (also much quoted) in this 1957 ending, albeit in Kerouac’s case, an echo also laced with a trace of Thomas Wolfe’s effusions.
Kerouac has departed a fair distance from the prosodic experimentation he was undertaking with some (albeit far from complete) consistency earlier in the 1950s. Shades of The Town and the City fall across some of these revisions, which suggest how much time has passed, allowing adjustments to Kerouac’s aesthetic.[6]
What I am seeking to do in this extended exploration is to establish that “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing” would be, if composed in 1957, not wholly out of line with the sort of somewhat compromised writing which Kerouac had been drawn into by then. It has the same sort of highly quotable elegiac note as many of Kerouac’s late 1950s revisions of the scroll text of On the Road. Thus “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing” should not be simply depicted as a transition piece marking the passage from Kerouac’s “early romanticism” towards “his later spiritual disillusionment”. It would, rather, marking a breakdown of continuity—one that tends towards reductiveness.
But now things become difficult. What “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing” constitutes otherwise is opaque. Its storyline (if that is what it can be called) does not fit at all readily into the text of the novel, or the scroll version of On the Road. The events it depicts could not have happened. It certainly is not “a quintessential lost chapter” from On the Road.[7] Instead it would have to be regarded as a work of total fiction – flying in the face of Kerouac’s well-established commitment to writing heavily and more or less faithful autobiographical fiction.
Instead it would become, paradoxically, a standalone fragment in terms of its rudimentary storyline. But I want to suggest that as such it is a misleading pointer or symptom. It echoes the slightly mythologically sloppy effusions cropping up in the revisions found in the 1957 On the Road—ones that are periodically taken up in Kerouac’s later writing as he works away, with a declining artistry, at stitching together his “Duluoz saga”(—his increasing desire to produce a fictionalisation of his whole life, from beginning to end, no matter what compromises this might involve, even as these became legion).
The way “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing” chimes with passages in the revised 1957 On the Road would seem to confirm a 1957 composition date. This almost suffocating closeness of “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing” to some of the 1956-57 revisions of On the Road can draw attention to how far Kerouac was then diverging from what had been, for the most part, and at his writing’s best, two main strings to Kerouac’s artistic bow. The highly experimental explorations of any attempt to reproduce life-events authentically, as found in (say) Visions of Cody, were accompanied (usually coevally and generally in other writings by Kerouac) if not complimented by a desire to tell the story with a straight discursiveness, with a driving energy, and uninhibited by “literary” or self-editing restraint—a demanding recipe. Indeed, it was so demanding that it seems accurate to say that Kerouac slackened off as his alcoholism worsened, and so he turned to a more familiar set of constituents, more in line with mainstream American ideology. “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing” mirrors, indeed disturbingly enlarges this decline. It fits fairly flush with the softening mythologisations of the failure of the American dream, which Jack, often trailing Neal, is depicted as exploring in some of the 1956-57 revisions of the scroll in preparation for the publication of On the Road. Incidentally, and as a consequence, an implicit censoriousness is borne within these representations. Whilst interesting, this combination can be easily over-hyped. Indeed, it already has been. AI bears testimony to that.
Coda: Ah ha!
But, dear reader, notice how the fit between some of the 1956-57 revisions to On the Road and “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing” is close enough that, to an alarming degree, it almost becomes almost uncanny. Indeed, speculation has consequently and necessarily already begun to develop about whether “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing” is truly by Kerouac or constitutes a pastiche forgery – even, perhaps, an AI fake. (What counts against this last idea is its provenance, which would seem to rule out AI fakery.)[8] But it is a strange discovery: the claim that Kerouac produced “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing” as part of a “known practice” of “producing unique, typewritten pamphlets and chapbooks—sometimes referred to as ‘brochures’ by his circle … not [as] commercial publications but rather personal literary artefacts” (Barnett, 3) is not a suggestion that Kerouac scholars recognise. Its partial, hyperbolic fit with the poorest examples of Kerouac’s 1956-57 revisions disturbingly underlines just how much Kerouac was diverging from his previous literary aspirations. If it is fake, as its grossly stereotypical reproduction of motifs in Kerouac’s “Road” writing does indeed suggest, it is thus a fake constructed to fool the market and make (quite) a lot of money, its existence and the way it has been composed to deliberately echo Kerouac’s writing drives home how much mythic reductiveness Kerouac had been seduced into producing in the late 1950s, more or less partly as an ideological conservative, as his alcoholism and heavy drug use took greater hold. So “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing” becomes simultaneously a bad fake and, weirdly, kind of a good one. It becomes, effectively, a satiric reproduction of the writing Kerouac was beginning to turn to in his decline. Indeed, it may have been intended to be almost exactly that: a satiric attack on Kerouac’s ”beat” writing tossed off by one of the many ideological “opponents” of the Beats. Notice how the “signature” at the end would seem to have been added on later (the signature strangely crosses straight over folds in the paper).[9] It seems to be probably just that: a satiric parody later transformed into a fake.[10] As such, it has some (baby) teeth, when set alongside Kerouac’s 1957-58 softenings of his scroll—the quintessential instance being his novel’s closing paragraph, which verges on self-parody of these softenings. Parody of parody, all is parody.
(31/10/2025)
[1] Visions of Cody (1950-52) McGraw Hill, 1952; Mexico City Blues, New York: Grove Press, 1959; Old Angel Midnight (1956; 1959) Big Table Vol. 1 No, 1 (1959), pp,7-42; On the Road (1957) New York: Viking, 1957 (henceforth OTR); On the Road: the original scroll (1951) Penguin Classics, 2007 (henceforth OS); Doctor Sax (1948-52) New York: Grove Press, 1959; Tristessa (1955-56) New York: Avon Books, 1960; Maggie Cassidy (1952-53) New York: Avon Books, 1959; The Subterraneans (19539) New York: Avon Books, 1959; Desolation Angels, New York: Coward McCann, 1965.
[2] It is formulated in two short essays that only appeared in 1958, though Kerouac had promulgated the idea verbally somewhat earlier. See “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”, Evergreen Review Vol. 2 No. 5, Summer 1958, pp. 72-73 and “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose”, Evergreen Review Vol. 2 No. 8, Spring 1959, p. 57. We know, however, that, for example, when composing his “scroll”, he consulted his notebooks, letters from Neal Cassady, and other sources, as he typed.
[3] William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (1945) Penguin Classics, 2008.
[4] The Phrase “DOG ATE (Potchky – a dog)” was not reprinted in the Penguin edition. These words were written at the end of the surviving scroll typescript, apparently added by Kerouac.
[5] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/48084-so-in-america-when-the-sun-goes-down Accessed 27/10/2025
[6] We know that the reference to “God as Pooh Bear” in the 1957 novel’s ending stems from Kerouac’s involvement in an exchange involving Neal Cassady’s children in 1954. This establishes that On the Road’s closing paragraph must have been composed in the second half of the nineteen fifties. See R J Ellis “Six myths of On the Road and where these might lead us”, in Nicola Allen and David Simmons, eds, Reassessing the Twentieth Century Canon, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p.171,
[7] See David Barnett, “Found in a crime boss’s files: ‘lost’ chapter of Kerouac’s life on the road”, The Guardian, 11 October 2025, p 3. (Henceforth “Barnett”). Barnett is quoting from the 2025 auction catalogue issued by Your Own Museum.
[8] It has to be said that the provenance, though it is defined, seems more than slightly weird. Apparently, a mafia “crime boss” is involved, it seems. “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing” was found in his effects in 1985, after his death. See Barnett, p.3.
[9] The date ascribed to the piece by the auction catalogue, a date presumably located on this piece’s “binding”, is unlikely to be accurate, given my argument. I believe it must have postdated On the Road’s publication. The date, I argue, was chosen to make its authenticity seem more probable. The signature also seems to differ from Keoruac’s; in particular the way the “o” and the “u” are not joined up seems to be atypical (my thanks to Oliver Harris for pointing this divergence out).
[10] The purchaser of this piece may then have bought a pup, though it is difficult to be sure of anything without some sort of close forensic analysis. This limits what can be said about it.
