Fifty years ago this week, a generation of Americans went “On the Road.”
We were mostly in our late teens or early 20s, mostly male, and we had discovered Jack Kerouac’s picaresque narrative of his mad travels across postwar America. He and his fellow travelers called themselves “beat,” in the sense of “beat down” – by the system, by the whole smug, runaway consumer culture – but also in the sense of “beatific,” as in looking for a vision. (Kerouac was nominally Catholic.)
When “On the Road” came out in the fall of 1957, I was in Denver, the nexus of Sal Paradiso and Dean Moriarty and Carlo Marx’s frantic journeys from New York to San Francisco and back again.
Though I’d never actually set eyes on Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, I was riding the bus past those Larimer Street and Glenarm Place flophouses and bars 10 years earlier, just when the beat crew was ripping a wide path through the town, looking for thrills, for girls, for a fix, for a vision, and for Cassady’s long- lost hobo father.
The Library of America has just issued five of his “road” books – “On the Road,” “The Dharma Bums,” “The Subterraneans,” “Tristessa” and “Lonesome Traveler,” along with selections from his journal – in one of those deluxe editions that instantly signal that a writer is a Significant American Author.
Perhaps best of all, Viking is also releasing “On the Road: The Original Scroll,” the complete first text of the novel.
Jim Irsay, owner of pro football’s Indianapolis Colts, bought it in 2001 for $2.43 million.
Irsay sent the scroll out on the road because, he says, “I’ve always felt that you never own anything. You borrow. And the scroll needs to be seen by many.”
It was displayed in Denver and now is in Lowell, Mass., Kerouac’s hometown.
“He was a fine writer, a detailed craftsman, like the jazz musicians he honors so fulsomely,” says historian Douglas Brinkley, editor of the Library of America’s road books.
Brinkley, who is working on a Kerouac biography, was 17 years old when a bearded traveler handed him a copy of the book.
He immediately connected with it.
“When you bumped into somebody else who liked the book, they became an immediate friend,” he says. “Kerouac is in my DNA, like Dylan’s music.”
