Kerouac with the manuscript of his novel, which he typed up in April 1951 on a 120-foot-long continuous reel of paper.
The defining novel of the Beat Generation. Kerouac’s almost-autobiographical voyage of discovery tells of the bonds and limits of friendship, of broken dreams and plans gone awry in postwar America.
After the turmoil of World War II, America settled down to a period of much-needed stability, reaping the benefits of victory and wartime industrial development in a booming peacetime economy. The focus was on steady jobs, prosperity and wholesome family units.
There was inevitable reaction to this conventional vision of white middle-class America. Authors such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady sought greater meaning to life than mere material success. These voices of the Beat Generation felt that the bland conformity of postwar consumerism stultified the mind until it was beaten: Beat.
For Jack Kerouac (1922–69), another of the circle of Beat authors, being beaten down meant more – it reduced you to your core, an almost blissful state from which the only way was up. The Beat movement was not just the eternal rebellion of one generation against the previous one; it was a spiritual journey. In the 1940s Kerouac embarked on a series of road trips with Cassady, looking for another America and for a more spirited way of living. As he wrote to a student in 1961: ‘It was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him.’
In 1950, Kerouac received a long, disjointed letter from Cassady that inspired him to develop what he called ‘spontaneous prose’. Although he had already been trying to turn their trips into a novel, he now started again, telling his story in the literary equivalent of an improvised jazz solo, a stream of consciousness uninterrupted by paragraph breaks or new sheets of paper. He typed the first draft continuously on a scroll made by taping individual pages together to a length of 120 feet.
Kerouac with the manuscript of his novel, which he typed up in April 1951 on a 120-foot-long continuous reel of paper.
On the Road was finally published in 1957 after many revisions, including the fictionalisation of names and the removal of some sexually explicit episodes. Kerouac became Sal Paradise, Allen Ginsberg appeared as Carlo Marx, William S. Burroughs as Bull Lee, and Neal Cassady as Dean Moriarty.
In the book, Sal looks up to Dean, a wild, free spirit. Crisscrossing America in four trips, they meet a string of characters who prompt questions about class, race, conformity and change. But each journey, fuelled by alcohol, drugs and sex, is a little less carefree than the last. Dean, exciting as he is to be with, is not a reliable friend. When they part at the end, it is with little regret, and a sense that perhaps we all need to grow up, eventually.
Kerouac’s new form of prose, the literary equivalent of an Impressionist painting, divided critics. Some hailed it as visionary, while others condemned it as a self-indulgent road to nowhere, a novel in which nothing really happened.
On the Road is groundbreaking in its style, the finest book of the Beat Generation, which laid the groundwork for the radical movements of the 1960s. It inspired Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Tom Waits, Hunter S. Thompson and many more, as well as films like Easy Rider and Thelma and Louise. Today, in a professionalised, over-regulated, overprotective world in which once again conformity and prosperity are the conventional goals, we can still be inspired by On the Road.
