Varieties of Literary Interpretations of Jazz in American Writings of the 1950s and 1960s

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Dusseldorf "Heinrich Heine", 113 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In a retrospective, black musical forms experienced a fast stylistic development and an increasing popularity amongst a wide audience of artists and youngsters inclined to American subculture all through the 1940s, '50s, and '60s.

One of the most influential and significant among these musical forms was jazz music. Writers began to apply it to their own work in manifold ways. From a retrospective, the effect of this convergence of jazz and literature, which is now commonly referred to as 'jazz literature', was mostly structural or thematic (and sometimes even both), and would soon cover a great variety of different literary genres.
The present thesis aims to identify the various ways in which writers applied their experiences with jazz music to their writings. It covers different literary genres and authors, such as John Clellon Holmes, Amiri Baraka, Jack Kerouac, and James Baldwin.