Rereading Kerouac’s Dharma Bums

Revisiting a book that influenced a lot of would-be Buddhists

Photo by Timothy Meinberg on Unsplash

Kerouac was showing up in the news a few weeks ago for the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication of Big Sur, a novel about the breakdown of a famous beat author, based on Kerouac himself. This was not a new thing for Kerouac who was the narrator and protagonist of most of his autobiographical…