Please join us to celebrate the latest publication by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn. Big American Writer recasts Jack Kerouac as an ethnic, bilingual author, demonstrating that his French-Canadian upbringing and background were formative to his breakthrough literary achievements. Building on years of archival excavation, Cloutier demystifies the Beat writer’s complex compositional practices and techniques of self-translation and reveals that Kerouac pioneered new ways of capturing the orality of North American French in his manuscripts and invented the “Spontaneous Prose Method” in part as a reaction to his thwarted hope to live in French.