Today I came across an article in the Independent celebrating Jack Kerouac’s On the Road at 60. I read Kerouac’s book when I was an undergrad writing my own poems and short stories, and scheming my own cross-country road trip which I actually took in 1992. Kerouac’s book, page-to-page, was both the best and worst book I’d ever read at that time. Years later I found Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans and felt that by sticking with one location — San Francisco — the author was able to condense the all-over-the-place expressing of On the Road into a love story full of angsty longing.
On the Road may not be the best book of the Beat Generation, but along with Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch it’s one point of the holy trinity of the Beat canon. It’s also a book that continues to inspire young dreamers. Here’s the Independent…
All I really knew was that On the Road absorbed me completely. It was like nothing I’d read before. It didn’t follow any traditional structure of fiction that I’d encountered previously. The language was lyrical and urgent and demanded to be read out loud, under my breath, to appreciate the rhythm. It was poetry and prose all mixed together that bounced along to a head-nodding, foot-tapping cadence.
My copy of On the Road was a Penguin 20th Century Classics edition, with a pale-blue spine. On the front cover was a photograph by Robert Frank, entitled “Teardrops”. It depicted a table in an American diner with its jukebox selector, and the ghost of a wide American car in the background. Somewhat surprisingly, it survived the trip to Pamplona in remarkably good shape; I still have it today.
On the Road is the Jack Kerouac novel everyone has heard of, but it’s only one part of Kerouac’s great literary endeavour; a vast, Proustian tapestry of his life and the others that weave in and out of it. There’s The Dharma Bums,The Subterraneans, Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax… 13 novels in all, which I tracked down and devoured, slowly realising that the recurring characters under fictional names were all real people in what Kerouac dubbed The Duluoz Legend – Duluoz being one of the alter egos he created for himself at the behest of his publishers who feared these tales of drugs, booze and debauchery might bring legal problems on their heads if Kerouac used real names.
Still, is is On the Road that is the pivotal book in the whole series. It is, in a way, Kerouac’s “A New Hope”… just like the seminal film Star Wars began halfway through the sequence, it’s the one beloved of most…
Here’s the second chapter of the excellent Rebels: A Journey Underground series that introduces the Beats…
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