Right, we'll just chalk it up to publicity, then, and ignore all of those reviewers, critics, other writers, and many, many readers who DON'T think it's "crap" then, shall we, Ted? After all, you're the great iconoclast here, so let's all follow YOU now, eh?

Follow your own lead, Horus, that is exactly the point. It's funny that some of us get antsy when Kerouac's legacy is challenged. In any event, I'm hardly alone among readers who've had enough of the uncritical attention Kerouac continues to get. No doubt this thread will be overwhelmed with lovers of Kerouac's work, but let it not be said that a dissenting vote wasn't cast when this curious coronation was taking place.

Your post seems more of a confession of your own shallowness, dishonesty, and resentment than any sort of analysis of Kerouac. It's as if he's responsible for your lying about your feelings about the book....that he's making everyone tout it as 'hip'....that he's the girlfriend who thinks you're a putz. Yep, it's all Jack, not you at all.

So much of what has passed as analysis and informed commentary on Kerouac's work has been in the form of undigested memoir and idealized recollection when the author would recall their first encounter with "On the Road" or "The Subterraneans" and how the experience changed their lives, changed the way they thought about experience, changed the very culture of American Life. Personal anecdotes and testimonials, at best, multiplied by decades, nearly all exhibiting soft thinking regarding Kerouac's skills as a writer.Such easy estimations of who I think are better , greater writers (Mailer, Pynchon, DeLillo,Gaddis) would be unacceptable to the demanding reader, Kerouac's critical reputation gets a pass. My compressed gripe, grumpy autobiography as much as condensed criticism, is personal, sure, but no more than the love notes Kerouac recieves from his fans. In this context, my squib is of no less value, and it still makes a point. And it's not all Jack, of course, otherwise I wouldn't have included that brief bit of pretending to like his writing for reasons extraneous to literary appreciation. I was petty, vain, insecure, the whole teenage/college freshman shot, but as fucked up as I was in my unintellectual use of Kerouac's name, it typifies what I think consumers of the counter culture name brands were actually doing, using the Beats, Buddhism, drugs and varying degrees of political cant to satisfy baser desires. What people saw in Kerouac wasn't literature or art but an invitation to indulge The Fuck Up Within.