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Big American Writer: The Bilingual Jack Kerouac

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Lecture Humanities

Tue, Oct 13, 2026

12 PM – 1:20 PM EDT (GMT-4)

Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room 144

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

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Dark haired man looking into a glass window. Flyer for Big American Writer: The Bilingual Jack Kerouac
Jean-Christophe Cloutier will discuss his new book, Big American Writer: The Bilingual Jack Kerouac, a study that recasts Jack Kerouac as an ethnic, bilingual author, and demonstrates that his French-Canadian upbringing and background were formative to his breakthrough literary achievements. Though Kerouac has long been mythologized as an all-American figure, the “King of the Beats” was born Jean-Louis Kérouac to immigrant parents from Québec and was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. Throughout his career, Kerouac not only secretly composed French manuscripts, wrestling with shame over his immigrant origins, but also served as a self-translator to find literary success in the United States. Kerouac’s archived experimentations ventured to capture the orality of North American French, inventing a scripturality in kinship with French Caribbean and other creolized traditions of the Global Francophone world.

Where

Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room 144

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

Speakers

Jean-Christophe Cloutier's profile photo

Jean-Christophe Cloutier

University of Pennsylvania

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (Columbia UP, 2019) and Big American Writer: The Bilingual Jack Kerouac (forthcoming October 2026 from Columbia UP). He is co-editor of Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth (Penguin Classics, 2017), and editor of La vie est d’hommage (Boréal, 2016) and Sur le chemin (Gallimard, 2023), which gather the original French writings of Jack Kerouac. He also translated two of Kerouac’s French manuscripts for The Unknown Kerouac (The Library of America, 2016).


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Program in Translation and Intercultural Communications | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies