Jack Kerouac, Oscar Lewis, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau? Aaron Chandler’s “Slum Simulacra: Jack Kerouac, Oscar Lewis, and Cultures of Poverty” offers a wildly engaging story about the genealogy of the aspirations and contradictions behind twentieth-century American countercultural thinking about the question of poverty. Juxtaposing Jack Kerouac’s literary manifesto On the Road with Oscar Lewis’s anthropological works in Five Families and Children of Sanchez, where the phrase culture of poverty was first coined—and rooting both in what the author calls “Rousseau’s divided property metaphysics”—this essay shows how conservative attitudes toward poverty is nowhere as interesting, or as complex, or as vexing as liberal, progressive attempts to grapple with poverty.The author traces the aspirations, contradictions, and ironies that dog the legacies of both Kerouac’s and Lewis’s “field works”: how the novel that ignited the birth of American postwar counterculture was itself based on a racially and economically problematic (not to mention drunken) excursion through an “othering” of Mexico, on the one hand; and how, on the other, an earnest anthropological study about poor families in Mexico aimed to expose the peculiarities of modern poverty subculture ended up being popularized and reappropriated by Johnsonian antipoverty policies and rhetoric. If Lewis’s formulation of “the culture of poverty” was meant to critique industrialization for producing slums, fomenting antisocial behaviors, and perpetrating a legacy of powerlessness (Lewis himself saw socialism as a solution to this crisis), his phrase and concept was soon reappropriated by the conservative right to claim that ameliorative social policy was itself reinforcing a subcultural virus festering in the tenements. While neither Kerouac nor Lewis could have anticipated the receptions and afterlives of their writing, this essay shows how both shared an investment, even if differently motivated, in the moral and aesthetic identification with the poor, and both ended up producing versions of what the author calls “slum simulacra.” The essay ends with a look at the short-lived fate of the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) in 1964, as a kind of organic extension of this history of “slum simulacra” where, as the author wryly puts it, “a group of mainly middle-class activists set about the radical project of becoming poor themselves.”This essay has been a fascinating read about the endless ironies of what it means to have a liberal discourse about poverty, what it means to “identify with the other,” and how we think about the legacy of the counterculture.The Andrew J. Kappel Prize in Literary Criticism, named for the late critic and esteemed deputy editor of Twentieth-Century Literature, is awarded annually to the author of a work submitted to the journal during the preceding year that is judged to make the most impressive contribution to our understanding and appreciation of the literature of the twentieth century. Nominees are chosen by the editor of Twentieth-Century Literature and members of the editorial board. A different prominent literary critic serves each year as judge.