France-Florida Research Institute

“I never had a language of my own”: Jack Kerouac and the making of a “Big American Writer”

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, an M.A. from SUNY Buffalo, and a B.A. in Liberal Arts and English from Concordia University, Montréal (Canada). At Columbia, he also worked as an archivist in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library where, among other collections, he processed the papers of Samuel Roth, Erica Jong, and former publisher of Grove Press, Barney Rosset.

He is the author of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (Columbia University Press, 2019), which won the fifth annual Matei Calinescu Prize from the Modern Language Association (MLA), the MSA 2019 First Book Prize from the Modernist Studies Association, and the 2020 Waldo Gifford Leland Award from the Society of American Archivists; it was also shortlisted for the 2020 ASAP Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. The book focuses on the archival investments of midcentury African American novelists and engages with several newly-discovered primary texts as it sketches the troubled history of black special collections in the U.S.