On The Road With Proust

 I saw the movie On the Road last weekend, and I couldn't help noticing the copy of Swann's Way always laying around as Sal (Jack) was working on his books.

 Obviously, Proust was a big influence on Kerouac.  

Proust's madeleines ...
well like the ones he would have had.

A saying of Proust's that I have
sitting on my computer desk.

Another big Proust fan is Cliff Pickover, who quotes Proust left, right, and center in his book Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves.
"The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs everyday"
Marcel Proust, The Sweet Cheat Gone.

Also, a major influence on Jack Kerouac was Lee Konitz.
 "On October 7, 1951, after a gloomy Sunday when he seemed to be making no progress on the chapters about Neal Cassady he was adding to On the Road, Jack went to Birdland to hear the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, who recently had come into his own as a leading innovator of cool jazz.  
During Konitz's solo in "I Remember April," which he played as if it were "the room he lived in," his music sounded "so profoundly interior" to Jack that he was sure very few people would understand it. 
In fact, he compared Konitz's extended phrases to the sentences he was writing lately, sentences whose direction seemed mysterious until the "solution" was suddenly unveiled in a way that shed light backward on everything that had preceded it. 
Admiring Konitz for refusing to make the concessions that would gain him a wider audience, Jack saw that both he and the musician were essentially doing the same thing -- attempting to communicate "the unspeakable visions of the individual." 
Grabbing a pencil, he scribbled a reminder to himself: 
"BLOW AS DEEP AS YOU WANT TO BLOW." 
It was a rule he would start to follow in his work, despite his continued brooding about his tormenting inability to finish his second novel."
"Tranced Fixations" -- Kerouac's Breakthrough