One of the few writers in the forties and fifties to venture into and write about that ‘other America’, Jack Kerouac was a literary trailblazer who, arguably, turned from that other America and became the kind of aged right-wing American the younger version of himself would have despised. The younger version of himself, I think, would have liked Jan Kerouac and may even have acknowledged her as his daughter and supported her literary endeavours. The stand out of which is the newly reissued Baby Driver. An autobiographical novel that takes Jan through North and South America from childhood to adulthood via all kinds of stories, incidents and adventures. Movement and a dislike of the straight life installed in her by a childhood where stasis, middle class respectability and the white picket fence were enjoyed by others, “I was in the Brownie Scouts…and my mother was scout leader. It was the closest we ever came to being normal, respectable members of a community - the zenith of my short-lived experience in the straight life”. Freedom a much-abused concept in the U.S. but for Jan Kerouac it’s a personal liberation from all kinds of societal expectations and unwritten rules - which also makes her feel good, “I was often deluged in those days, by a feeling of fabulous freedom. Lasting only an instant it washed over me like a bucket of cold water”. This bold, brave and brilliant book a testament to that kind of freedom and that kind of life. A book as outside the mainstream now as it was then, Baby Driver is one of the classic texts of The Beat’s (mostly female) second/third wave and should be filed alongside Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters, Hettie Jones’s How I Became Hettie Jones and Diane Di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik. Just to add, Baby Driver is Dead Ink’s inaugural title in their Outsider Classics series, and is not only a beautiful edition, with great cover design, but promises much for subsequent volumes. I can’t wait for the next one.

Baby Driver – Jan Kerouac publ. by Dead Ink £10.99

Steven Long