Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form

Research monograph — Southern Illinois University Press

Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form examines Kerouac’s experimental writing in relation to the literary, artistic and musical cultures of post-war America. Hrebeniak focuses on Kerouac’s development of “wild form”: writing that challenges inherited conventions of narrative, grammar and syntax. The book connects this approach with modernist poetics, action painting, bebop and oral traditions, placing Kerouac’s work within a broader history of experimentation across the arts. 

Moving beyond a primarily biographical account, Hrebeniak investigates how literary form emerges through performance, perception, consciousness and memory. His discussion includes Kerouac’s changing approaches to narrative organisation, the representation of Neal Cassady in Visions of Cody, and the relationship between spontaneous prose, speech and written notation. These questions establish writing as an active creative process rather than simply a record of the author’s experiences. 

The study also situates Kerouac’s formal innovations within the political pressures of the Cold War and the tensions of American counterculture. It considers both the liberatory ambitions of his writing and his movement towards more conservative positions, connecting aesthetic experimentation with the contradictions of his cultural and political trajectory