On the Road

Kerouac wrote the entire novel in a caffeine and Benzedrine fueled, three week typewriting marathon at a friend's apartment in New York City in 1951.  He used just one long, scrolled piece of paper.  Twelve-foot-long sheets of tracing paper were taped together to make a continuous roll about 120 feet long.  He employed a jazz-music inspired improvisational style which was spontaneous and exhilarating.  When it was finally published six years later, it won critical acclaim from many as a masterpiece which defined a post-World War II generation of intellectual outcasts on an  aimless odyssey across America.  Others dismissed it. "That's not writing. That's typing," author Truman Capote said in a review of Kerouac's book.  "It's the way that it was written that, in many ways, is more important than what it really is," said Howard Collinson, director of the University of Iowa Museum of Art. "That it kind of just spewed out of him is what it's all about."

Kerouac actually spent a good deal of time preparing for the creative eruption that produced On the Road.  Carolyn Cassady, the wife of Kerouac's friend and traveling companion Neal Cassady, let him use her apartment to write the book.  She remembers her houseguest as a sensitive and disciplined writer.  She says Kerouac was always looking for material, which he would record in a tiny notebook all the time he was roaming around.  When he got somewhere where he could settle down for a few weeks or months he would write like crazy, pulling the fragments together.

Jack had taken a road trip from the East Coast to San Francisco with Neal Cassady and his ex-wife Luanne in 1949.  He also took several other trips across America and Mexico, sometimes driving with Neal Cassady in a car and sometimes hitchhiking, visiting their friends Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.  It was these cross-country trips that provided much of the content for On the Road.  He wrote about them exactly as they had happened, without pausing to edit or fictionalize.  Through Neal, Jack had found his his voice. "We gotta go and never stop going till we get there," Cassady had said. When Jack asked where they were going, Neal replied, "I don't know, but we gotta go till we get there."  Neal's frantic speech and letters, with their echoes of jazz and bop music inspired Jack's "spontaneous prose." 

When the book was done Jack was pleased with the results and the departure he had made from "previous American Lit." "I really wrote a great book," he told Cassady in one letter; in another he promised: "I won't get the screwing Melville got"--referring to the great 19th century writer who had labored through life in obscurity.  He told Cassady: The story "deals with you and me and the road...Went fast because road is fast." (Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, New York: Viking, 1995).  Unfortunately, his editor did not share his enthusiasm and Kerouac would suffer seven years of rejection before On the Road would be published.

On the Road was finally published in 1957.  The book was tremendously successful and Jack returned to New York a celebrity.  He had become the representative of the Beat generation, the voice of his generation. 

Contact Us                    Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2004 Strictly Sixties.com