Scott Beauchamp: “The spiritually inverted radicals of the Sixties who sacralized their politics and secularized their spirituality – blame Reich and Marcuse – read Kerouac with blinders on. They only saw what they wanted to see, and what they wanted to see was a celebration of the ‘freedoms’ of hedonism. … The truth is more complex and so much more interesting: Kerouac” – who described himself as a “strange solitary Catholic mystic” – “was one of the most humble and devoted American religious writers of the 20th century.”