R. Crumb

Robert Crumb (b. 1943) read widely and deeply a long roster of authors including Robert Louis Stevenson Charles Dickens J. D. Salinger Jack Kerouac William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg as well as religious classics including biblical Buddhist Hindu and Gnostic texts. Crumb's genius according to author David Stephen Calonne lies in his ability to absorb a variety of literary artistic and spiritual traditions and incorporate them within an original American mode of discourse that seeks to reveal his personal search for the meaning of life. <p/> R. Crumb: Literature Autobiography and the Quest for Self contains six chapters that chart Crumb's intellectual trajectory and explore the recurring philosophical themes that permeate his depictions of literary and biographical works and the ways he responds to them through innovative dazzling compositional techniques. <p/> Calonne explores the ways Crumb develops concepts of solitude despair desire and conflict as aspects of the quest for self in his engagement with the book of Genesis and works by Franz Kafka Jean-Paul Sartre the Beats Charles Bukowski and Philip K. Dick as well as Crumb's illustrations of biographies of musicians Jelly Roll Morton and Charley Patton. Calonne demonstrates how Crumb's love for literature led him to attempt an extremely faithful rendering of the texts he admired while at the same time highlighting for his readers the particular hidden philosophical meanings he found most significant in his own autobiographical quest for identity and his authentic self.