They primarily settled in California, where The Dharma Bums is set. Still, Buddhism has a long history in the United States, starting with the arrival of immigrants from Asia the early 1800s. Kerouac and his friends famously viewed Buddhism as a way to put spirituality, human interconnection, and nature above the mainstream culture’s values of consumerism, conformity, and suburban isolation.

The Dharma Bums is set in the mid-1950s, a period of sustained economic expansion when Americans increasingly began living in car-dependent suburbs, and television increasingly became the basis of American popular culture.

Kerouac himself followed in 1969, dying of an internal hemorrhage related to his lifelong alcoholism. However, during this period, Kerouac’s mother, sister, and close friend Neal Cassady all passed away. Over the next five years, he sold almost a dozen of the manuscripts he had written in the previous decade, and he became a fixture of American popular culture by the mid-1960s. The book was an instant success, and Kerouac was soon identified as “the king of the beat generation.” He published The Dharma Bums the next year but was widely criticized for his interpretation of Buddhism. The events he recounts in The Dharma Bums occurred in the two years before he published On the Road in 1957. In the process, he took several cross-country trips, married and divorced twice, and wrote more than 10 books, including On the Road. Kerouac lived on and off in New York for the next decade. During World War II, he joined the Navy but was quickly discharged for psychiatric reasons. Kerouac then spent a year in the Merchant Marine, during which he wrote his first book, The Sea Is My Brother (which was not published until 2011). He met the other pioneering writers of the Beat Generation during this time, including Allen Ginsberg (who appears in The Dharma Bums as Alvah Goldbrook) and Neal Cassady (the central figure of Kerouac’s most well-known novel, On the Road). A star football player in high school, Kerouac won an athletic scholarship to Columbia University but broke his leg in his first year and dropped out in his second. His older brother’s sudden death at age nine, as well as his intense early experiences in the Catholic Church, left a mark on his life and work. Jack Kerouac was born and raised in a French Canadian family in the Boston suburbs.

Kerouac the dharma bums