Jack Kerouac's On The Road Turns Fifty (includes video of Jack reading from On The Road)

Jack Kerouac's On The Road was published nearly fifty years ago (on September 5). It is still taught in college, and it has spoken to several generations of readers now as well as being one of the seminal texts of both the 60's counterculture and the 50's beat subculture.

I devoured this book when I was in high school, and many times afterwards. It led me to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg (who we bumped into off and on in our NYC days), and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (the last man standing among the beats), Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, Diane DiPrima, John Clellon Holmes, Lew Welch, Phillip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and, of course, Neal Cassady, and the next generation of Ken Kesey, Jean Shepherd, Ed Sanders, Jim Carroll, and others.

The hero of some of Jack's novels, Neal Cassady, was a link between the beats and the next generation; he "starred" in several of Kerouac's novels, but also went on to pilot the bus Furthur for Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters (detailed in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test), as well as rap as a performer at the infamous Acid Tests. [Note: I use the word rap here as it was used in the 60's, meaning to speak in an extended improvisatory mode]. What many of us learned from the book was that you could write about America and not necessarily have to wear the straightjacket of our European antecedents. And that you could write a book patterned on the actual America around us. . .a book that found the rhythms of the road, and detailed what we now know were just the beginnings of being connected. They connected by routes and highways; we have found new, but not better ways to make that connection.



Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady (a/k/a Dean Moriarty)


What I have enjoyed about this 50th anniversary is reading the critical acclaim for Kerouac, and in particular for On The Road. The New York Times fell all over itself this weekend, detailing Kerouac's enormous cultural influence, but also not ignoring his impact on literature. His influence on rock and roll (interestingly, he wasn't a fan) has been enormous. In many ways, Jack Kerouac was the first modern "indy" writer (I would have to put William Blake and Walt Whitman as the first). All these years later, On The Road still sells 100,000 copies a year (although I suspect it will outstrip that this year).



My favorite works from Kerouac, the beats, their disciples and offshoots:

Kerouac: On The Road, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Neal, Scattered Poems, Book of Dreams, Big Sur, Maggie Cassidy
Neal Cassady: The First Third (memoir), Selected Letters
Allen Ginsberg: Planet News, Howl
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: All the poetry
Phillip Whalen: On Bear's Head
William Burroughs: Naked Lunch, Junky, Exterminator, The Yage Letters, Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, The Burroughs File, The Adding Machine
Hunter S. Thompson: The Gonzo Papers, Volumes 1,2,3, The curse of Lono, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Rum Diaries, The Hells Angels
Lew Welch: Ring of Bone
Ed Sanders: The Family, Tales of Beatnik Glory, 1968: A History in verse, Love and Fame in New York
Diane DiPrima: Memoirs of a Beatnik , Pieces of a song, Loba,
Denise Levertov: Selected Poems
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