There's a value, I guess, but it's safe to say Pynchon grew out of his Kerouac phase just as I grew out of my fascination with Ayn Rand. The Kerouac cult, on the other hand, clings rather too adoringly to JK's image, and spends far too much time with the long , backward glance when conditions in the United States were quite a bit different than what they are today. Nostalgia is the determining factor, I think. One suspects that there's a collective underground wish that the culture could be rolled back and we could go through the fifties and early sixties all over again.