How did Thomas Wolfe influence Jack Kerouac’s early novel The Town & the City?

Jack Kerouac’s first published novel, The Town & the City (1950), was significantly influenced by the work of Thomas Wolfe.12

Critics at the time considered Kerouac’s novel to be derivative of Wolfe’s popular autobiographical works, specifically Of Time and the River (1935) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940). Wolfe’s writing style, which often featured grandiose, lyrical, and autobiographical narratives, served as a notable inspiration for many young writers of that era, including Kerouac.12

While The Town & the City helped Kerouac articulate his "New Vision"—a theme centered on the idea that "everything was collapsing"—he eventually became dissatisfied with the pace of the prose found in this early work. This frustration, combined with the influence of bebop jazz, later drove him to develop his signature "spontaneous bop prosody" for his subsequent novels.1