Is Kerouac underrated?

Is Kerouac underrated?

It's the other way around.

I've read most of his books and it gave a really good idea of the mindset that has permeated in the US in the second half of the 20th century.

Where I once found him inspiring and adventurous, I later found him sad and lost in a world divorced from meaning. He was less of a religious wanderer than a tragically lost little sheep, and the despair he felt can be seen in how he drank himself to death on purpose.

I certainly think Dharma Bums is underrated, not because its a life-altering philosophical text or anything like that just because its so damn fun
I had a big goofy smile plastered right over my face the entire time I read it

People take the Beats too seriously, I reckon

He did seem to live a charmed life until his later year which were just sad. He lived the kind of adventurous writer's life boring fucks like me rarely get around to doing.

He's the author to read when you're twenty-something and want to go on an adventure, but are too chickenshit to go through with it. Then you read him and go on said adventure and are no longer a sexually repressed /pol/tard and life is beautiful. I don't hold really him in high regard anymore, but his prose unironically changed my life.

Yes I completely understand that. He inspired me to make some...interesting choices in my life...in a search of authenticity (what else?)

Big sur is a good book. And the new-ish movie based on it was better than the one based on On the Road.

>He's the author to read when you're twenty-something and want to go on an adventure, but are too chickenshit to go through with it. Then you read him and go on said adventure and are no longer a sexually repressed /pol/tard and life is beautiful. I don't hold really him in high regard anymore, but his prose unironically changed my life.

Well put user, I totally agree. Is he Proust? No. Is he inspiring? Absolutely.

What if I'm to pretentious to ever be set off by Kerouc after being exposed to the greatest western literature and the Veeky Forums circle jerk that accompanies them

>nu-male now knows a little something about life after going on the road and fucking children like his hero Kerouac
kek. You're a hedonistic degenerate, not an artist-god enlightened by his superior love of jazz

take a hot pajama on that, kitty cat. *snaps jazzily*