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How did Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker influence Jack Kerouac?

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Portrait of Jack Kerouac, American novelist and poet, looking over his shoulder in a collared shirt, circa 1965. — Jack Kerouac American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac, c. 1965.

The bebop jazz of Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker was a primary influence on Jack Kerouac, driving him to develop a writing style known as "spontaneous bop prosody."12

Kerouac drew direct analogies between his literary process and the improvisational techniques of jazz musicians. He viewed himself as a horn player "blowing" one long note, using his writing to capture the immediacy of experience in a way that mirrored the fast-paced, rhythmic nature of bebop. To achieve this, he eschewed conventional punctuation, favoring the use of dashes to separate "rhetorical breathing"—a technique he explicitly compared to a jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases.32

This approach allowed Kerouac to move away from linear, prosaic structures toward a more poetic, "riffing" style of composition. By writing in a semi-trance state, he sought to bypass conscious revision, which he felt was a form of "literary lying," and instead capture the pure, unadulterated truth of the moment.3