Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. Jack Kerouac's book, OLD ANGEL MIDNIGHT, begins with two introductory essays written by Ann Charters and Michael McClure detailing their experiences with and reflections on the poet. Kerouac proclaims that the long prose poem, Old Angel Midnight, is the only work "I've ever written in which I allow myself the right to say anything." An uninhibited work with minimum breaks and sections organized by numbers, OLD ANGEL MIDNIGHT is a flow of consciousness from beginning to end. A beat poet, Jack Kerouac's work was a critical contribution to the movement in poetry.
Synopsis
Old Angel Midnight (1959) was one result of Kerouac's automatic writing experiments in which he would spill his chemically inspired thoughts onto paper to see what came out. Though Kerouac was initially denounced by literary critics as an oddball, his spontaneous twistings and turnings of language rate well with those of Joyce and Stein, and time has proven him to be an important and enduringly popular American writer.-Library Review