The Sixties and After

Abstract

Chandler died in 1959, Hammett in 1961, Steinbeck in 1968, Cain in 1977. All but Hammett were active till the end; and, though there was slackening of power in their later works, all retained considerable influence. Chandler and Steinbeck in particular bear relation to the movements of the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley (1960) was itself derivative of the movement of a younger generation back to the populist road he had travelled in the 1930s. Jack Kerouac was the seminal figure in this movement, his roman à clef, On the Road (1957), its Bible. As Frederick Feied points out in his monograph No Pie in the Sky, Kerouac was last in a line of American practitioners of a genre that had its origins in Whitman but first major prose enunciation in London’s The Road (1907).¹ The California lodestone had been influential in this genre’s development. Twain’s Roughing It was an early road book. Harte’s ‘My Friend, the Tramp’ was the first sympathetic literary depiction of its type of hero. Henry George provided one of the first analyses of this new type in Progress and Poverty (1880):