Beatness Meets Marginality: San Francisco in Jack Kerouac’s Literature

Abstract

This article proposes an analysis of the interaction between a selection of Jack Kerouac’s fiction and poetry, the city of San Francisco, and social marginality. The Beat author’s texts studied here grant great prominence to the urban setting this city provides. The South of Market district—which constituted San Francisco’s skid row through the 1960s—offers an extensive cohort of marginal characters that are shown by Kerouac as praiseworthy examples of resistance to the social homogeneity that the 1950s American society pursued. Among these characters, the hobo stands out in these texts, for his individualistic ways represent the epitome of the detachment from the mainstream that Kerouac advocates. Our aim, in short, is to shed light on how the presence of San Francisco and its marginality is articulated by the author so that it becomes the most suitable city for him to vindicate those outcasts excluded from the larger community.