According to popular legend, Kerouac wrote the draft of the 307-page novel in April, 1951 in one coffee-cranked 36-hour session, typing the book single-spaced onto a 120-foot scroll of paper he had glued together.

Published in 1957 after much editing by the venerable Malcolm Cowley, the resulting “spontaneous prose,” as Kerouac coined it (Truman Capote commented snidely, “That’s not writing, that’s typing. . .”) was a kinetic masterpiece, much maligned at the time of publication -- “decadent,” “degenerate,” “desperate” and etc.-- though now considered by many to be a breakthrough novel in modern American fiction.

In addition to inspiring generations of young readers into itchy footed wanderlust, many writers, poets, musicians and artists claim reading “On The Road” was an event that set them free; those same beats inspiring, perhaps ruefully, the “hippie” generation, an eventually commercial mass movement Oregon beat writer Ken Kesey criticized for not doing its homework.

Older, and not a hell of a lot wiser, certainly, than I was when I first read “On The Road” back in the 50s, I returned to it recently after reading that Kerouac’s original manuscript has been placed on the auction block.
Now 62, I have lived 15 years longer than Kerouac, who died in 1969, a victim of booze and life’s bad weather. Along with the alcohol that killed him, the author suffered a perpetual hangover from “On The Road,” a novel that, despite his other works, would define him as the quintessential “beatnik.”

His biographer, Ann Charters, wrote that Kerouac had spent the first part of his career trying to get “On The Road” published, “and the rest of his life trying to live it down.” 

Kerouac’s alter ego, “Sal Paradise,” is the narrator and protagonist of the novel, and he shares the book’s exuberant ramblings with the frenetic and fatalistic “Dean Moriarity” -- in real life the same Neal Cassady who, older and sadder, would later drive Kesey’s acid-powered bus Further toward psychedelic horizons, and later, perhaps following some fatalistic vision, die lonely on some railroad
track in Mexico.

Some drop-in characters include the lightly disguised poet Allen Ginsberg (“Carlo Marx), and weirdo-writer-addict William Burroughs (Old Bull Lee), who with some others, including Oregon’s own Gary Snyder, made up the “Beat Generation’s” significant cadre.

The significance of “On The Road” is in the novel itself; it’s movement toward movement and freedom in an America unshackling itself from the restrictions of the Depression and World War II.  And even though the book was written and published in the 1950s, its travels occurred in the late 40s; in a less-crowded country lacking freeways and the clutter of corporate schlock. With fewer people and
less traffic the environment was cleaner, more expansive and sunrises and sunsets shone on an innocent optimism.

But to hell with all of that, the beats were saying. It was experience they were after, as Kerouac writes, taunting the smug complacency of the 50s: “. . . the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and (in) the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody
goes ’Awww!’” 

Try reading that aloud during the Sunday afternoon social at the Lutheran Fellowship.

For a budding writer like myself, someone who had suffered the spinsterish admonitions of Miss Coad’s freshman English class at Lincoln High School in the 1950s,  “On The Road” offered emancipation and a stirring restlessness. No longer did one feel obligated to move lock-step toward
insurance-salesmanship-suburban-security, but could actually find art and zen enlightenment in the kind of madness professed by Zorba.

Finding the “true path” would, in most of our lives, be a matter of attitude rather than experience, something to rationalize as an alternative after a hard day at the office. 
In later years, though I had not met Kerouac, I did have the opportunity to interview Ginsberg, Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Kesey, and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published many of these authors previous works under the imprint of famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.

Though most had enhanced Kerouac’s reputation as writer and personality, with Ginsberg going so far as to claim him as a minor deity (“St. Jacque”), I found their reflections on the 1950s’ beat generation somewhat pedestrian, Ferlinghetti commenting, “It was actually a rather boring time.”

Of course, that implies you had to be there. For those of us who weren’t, however, “On The Road” provided us with inspiration, a modicum of rebellion and the consideration that benign irresponsibility for art’s sake might not be such a bad thing after all.  In today’s world, dominated by corporations and the internet, perhaps Kerouac’s spontaneity might be more necessary than ever before. Analyzed not too closely,  “On The Road” has the sense of an e-mail message, a blurted sound bite announcing that life must be enjoyed to the fullest, and to hell with your
stock portfolio.  This means capturing feelings and holding them dear, no matter how painful. 

Now we realize that Kerouac was young, died young, and that his world was much different than ours.   Yet in his travels between San Francisco and New York, Denver and Old Mexico; in and out of friendships and love affairs, breaking hearts and being hurt; drinking too much, thinking too much and wondering about it all, Kerouac lived for us all.

‘ "That’s what I was trying to tell you--that’s what I want to be. I want to be like him. He’s never hung up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he’s the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you’ll finally get it.”

‘ “Get what?”

‘ “IT! IT! I’ll tell you--now no time, we have not time now.”’

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