The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac brings together 19 leading Kerouac scholars, who offer fresh perspectives on his multifaceted body of work, ranging from detailed analyses of his most significant books to wide-angle perspectives that place Kerouac in key literary, theoretical, and cultural contexts.

1. Kerouac's concept of his duluoz legend Ann Charters; 2. Kerouac and the profession of authorship Matt Theado; 3. Truth in confession: the foundation of Kerouac's literary experiment Nancy Grace; 4. The textuality of performance: Kerouac's spontaneous prose Tim Hunt; 5. The spontaneous aesthetic in the subterraneans George Mouritidas; 6. Kerouac and the 1950s Douglas Field; 7. The impact of on the road on the sixties' counterculture Kurt Hemmer; 8. Vanity of duluoz and the 1960s David Stephen Calonne; 9. Late Kerouac, or the conflicted 'king of the beatniks' Steven Belletto; 10. Visions of Cody as metafiction Michael Hrebeniak; 11. Making the past present: Kerouac and memory Erik Mortenson; 12. Spun rhythms: Kerouac as poet Regina Weinreich; 13. Kerouac's representations of women Ronna Johnson; 14. Kerouac and blackness Amor Kohli; 15. Kerouac, multilingualism, and global culture Hassan Melehy; 16. The two phases of Kerouac's American Buddhism Sarah Haynes; 17. Kerouac's ambivalences as an environmental writer Franca Bellarsi; 18. The essentials of archival prose Jean-Christophe Cloutier.