This content is from Wikipedia. We do not consider this content professional or citable. Please use your discretion when relying on it. GradeSaver also offers a professionally written study guide by one of our staff editors.

Reception

Reviewers criticized Dharma Bums for being spiritually crude and lacking seriousness. Ruth Fuller Sasaki found it a good portrait of Snyder, but thought Kerouac knew nothing about Buddhism. She wrote to Snyder, "His Buddhism is the most garbled and mistaken I have read in many a day ... I think everyone grants Kerouac's sensitivity of reaction and his ability to vividly write those reactions. I found the first mountain climbing episode quite exciting. But as a novelist he shows no talent whatsoever and no imagination."^[3] Alan Watts discounted it as "Beat Zen": "a shade too self-conscious, too subjective, and too strident to have the flavor of Zen."^[4]

Snyder wrote Kerouac, "Dharma Bums is a beautiful book, & I am amazed & touched that you should say so many nice things about me because that period was for me really a great process of learning from you...." but confided to Philip Whalen, "I do wish Jack had taken more trouble to smooth out dialogues, etc. Transitions are rather abrupt sometimes."^[5] Later, Snyder chided Kerouac for the book's misogynistic interpretation of Buddhism.^[6]