Title: On the Road Pdf
"An authentic work of art . . . the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is."--Gilbert Millstein, The New York Times "On the Road has the kind of drive that blasts through to a large public. . . . What makes the novel really important, what gives it that drive is a genuine new, engaging and exciting prose style. . . . What keeps the book going is the power and beauty of the writing."--Kenneth Rexroth, San Francisco Chronicle"One of the finest novels of recent years. . . a highly euphoric and intensely readable story about a group of wandering young hedonists who cross the country in endless search of kicks."--Leonard Feather, Downbeat Jack Kerouac(1922-1969), the central figure of the Beat Generation, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922 and died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969. Among his many novels are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Visions of Cody.
The classic novel of freedom and the search for authenticity that defined a generation
September 5th, 2017 marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of On the Road
Inspired by Jack Kerouac's adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naiveté and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.
Two American Wanderers In the fifty years since its publication in 1957, Kerouac's "On the Road" has become an American classic. As is the case with any important work of literature, different readers will find many ways or reading and understanding "On the Road." Some readers see the mad journeys of the characters in the book as a seeking,religious in character. Other readers, see the protagonists as out for "kicks", "gurls", and wild times. Some see Dean Moriarty as the hero of the book -- as the protagonist of a new way of life which became known as 'beat'. (The term "beatnik" is not used in "On the Road".) But it is also possible to read "On the Road" as a rejection of Dean Moriarty and the life he represents. I have read this book several times, and with each reading have got something new from it. It is a passionately written work with a tone of poetry, jazz, and movement. The book didn't impress me when I first read it as an adolescent many years ago, but it has become one of my favorite novels."On the Road" is an autobiographical novel. The two major characters are Dean Moriarty who is based on a figure named Neal Cassady (1926 -- 1968) and Sal Paradise, the first-person narrator who is based on Kerouac (1922 -- 1969) himself. The action of the story takes place between 1947 and 1950. When the novel opens the reader hears Paradise's inimitable voice: "I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. i had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead." Moriarty was born in Salt Lake City and had spent much of his youth in pool halls, reform school, and in prison, from which he had escaped. He came to New York City with his 16 year old wife, Marylou and met Kerouac and his friends. In his energy, restlessness, endless movement, and sexual libido, Paradise thinks he might find his way out of his sadness and purposelessness.The book tells of the friendship between Paradise and Cassady and of their many reckless journeys back and forth through the United States. Paradise first travels alone, by bus and by hitchiking, to catch up with Moriarty in Denver and in San Francisco. Throughout their trips, Moriarty looks for his elderly father who, as did his son, lived a life of vagrancy and criminality, and was thought to be wandering as a hobo or in jail. The two, in the company of others, travel back to the East coast, to New Orleans, to meet "Old Bull Lee" (William Burroughs -- the author of "The Naked Lunch"), to San Francisco and Denver again, through Chicago and Detroit, back to New York City, to the West coast, and to Mexico City, where Moriarty, for the second time in the book abandons Paradise who has become ill with disentery. In the final scenes of the book, the two wanderers have a reunion of sorts in New York City before Moriarty heads back to San Francisco to resume living with his second wife whom he has just divorced.The book proceeds at a frenetic pace as Moriarty drives recklessly from coast to coast, usually in cars he has borrowed. The book shows the breadth of America as well as the questing of rootless, troubled individuals with no particular place to go. "Whee, Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there," says Moriarty at one point. "Where we going man?" Sal asks. Moriarty responds, "I don't know but we gotta go."Besides the broad, travel scenes, "On the Road, includes detailed descriptive passages of many individuated scenes -- jazz clubs in San Franciso and New York, seedy all-night theatres, small hotels and road side stands, cold water flats in New York, a brothel in Mexico, and much else. There are strong characterizations of several characters in addition to Moriarty and Paradise, including Moriarty's three wives, Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Ed Dunkel and his wife Galatea -- who delivers a stunning rebuke late in the novel to Moriarty and his way of life. One of the finest extended passages in the book is the story in Part 1 of Paradise's brief affair with a young Mexican girl named Terry, which begins as the two are passengers on a bus to Los Angeles.But the focus of this book is on Paradise and Moriarty and their friendship and on how Moriarty changes Sal Paradise's life. Paradise is a writer who has just publised his first novel. (Kerouac's first book, "The Town and the City".) Paradise is torn between the fast-paced, romantic, woman-filled life he sees in Moriarty and his own feelings for a more conventional, settled life with a purpose -- as represented in "On the Road" by the character of his aunt. Paradise admires Moriarty deeply for his energy and attempts to maximize experience and optimism, while he is also troubled by Moriarty's violence, criminality and irresponsibility and by his treatment of his three wives. Galatea Dunkel's lengthy tirade against Moriarty, recounted by Paradise, is one of the key passages of "On the Road."After Moriarty abandons Sal in Mexico, Sal eventually makes his way back to New York City where he meets the woman who will become his second wife and makes what will prove to be an unsuccessful attempt at a domestic, settled life. Moriarty is sent packing alone into a cold night back to San Francisco. The book ends with an ambiguity in the relationship between Paradise and Moriarty which mirrors the ambiguity of the entire story and which is at the heart of the divergent interpretations of "On the Road." Many current readers, myself included, are inclined, contrary to the way the book was initially read, to see Kerouac as rejecting the meaningless life of the protagonists of "On the Road", even though he was much drawn to that way of life himself. But Moriarty has a tight hold on Paradise, who gives him up, if he does so, only with difficulty. As the book concludes, Paradise writes: "... nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old. I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."Robin FriedmanI used to love this book. Until I read it.Like so many boys who grow up in the Midwest, I revered my father. My father was a Republican, who loved Reagan and taxes and the military and said God Made America. And like so many boys, I wanted to please my father. Truth be told there was once a time in my life where I too would talk about taxes and abortion and guns and our revered troops and our God Given Right.And then, I turned 18 and went to college. And just like all the other Midwestern white boys who find themselves in school, alone and without the need to please their patriarch, I fell in love with being Progressive. I'd talk about ignorant, closed minded country bumpkins and their pickup trucks. I'd say Bush needed to be put on trial for war crimes and that taxes needed raised and it's a woman's body so it's her choice. I came to hate my father, and I came to know that I knew better than him in his closed mind in the Midwest. That the future didn't look like him. I never did drugs, I didn't even drink alcohol until I was a few months over 21, and I never traveled to Berlin or Chile or Thailand, and I may have never owned the Birkenstocks or the old, travel-worn bag. But I knew from my reading and my friends and my freedom that the old man was just plain wrong. I knew this.And a large reason I knew it was because of this book. On The Road has been said to be to hippies what the Bible is to Christians. Bob Dylan read this book and then started Folk Rock, it's said. The Beat Generation may have came before the Baby Boomers, but when Baby Boomers went to the bookstores just as soon as they were old enough they bought On The Road, and Howl and Naked Lunch. The idea of other ways to live, other ways to be other than a company man sending troops all over the world was supposed to have started with the Beats. It was Kerouac and Ginsburg and Burrows and a host of others that turned the Beatles from suit wearing British boys into long haired, bearded, sunglasses wearing hippies who fought the war and the squares and expanded their mind. And the hippies just wanted peace and free love and an end to racism and sexism, right? It was Nixon who killed real freedom, the freedom our long haired brethren from Berkeley and Frisco fought for. That was something I knew.And I went on believing this, really knowing this, for a long time. That somewhere in our past was a truth that was squelched by oppressive forces like Nixon and Reagan and even Clinton and then Bush. The names of other old patriarchs who were stopping the future from coming. That all we needed was the future and the future promised to us years before by the long lost Counter-Culture of the 1960s.I knew all this, right up until I was watching CNN about three weeks ago. I was on my Amazon Fire TV, on the CNN App, watching this show produced by Tom Hanks called "The 60s." It was this little mini-series, that has been replicated for every decade since, and it talked about Rock and Roll and Vietnam and Jack and Bobby and 1968. But it also talked about the hippies, and toward the end of that hour of television something happened that I started me un-knowing what I had known. Because it turns out that Jack Kerouac, in 1968, went on William F. Buckley's TV show and completely and unequivocally dis-owned the hippies.I was floored. Here was the hero whose foundation held up the Counter-Culture's house, on the show of an old-school white guy Republican ideologue, saying he wanted nothing to do with the hippies. Just what in the heck?I, now a 30 year old Midwesterner with the Internet, checked out Wikipedia. Turns out old Jack Kerouac was a lifelong Catholic (yes, even when writing the Dharma Bums), who painted portraits of the Pope and carried a rosary. He played football in High School and went to college on a football scholarship. This square was the guy who people flocked to to change the world? This dude wearing jeans and a t-shirt and drinking a tall can of Budweiser? That article on Wikipedia was an eye-opener. Jack was also schizophrenic.Now, I am not going to ruin this book for you. I want to, I really do. But I bought the book and read it in maybe a week or so. Even now, a few hours after I put it down, I am floored and still collecting my thoughts. Kerouac is not who I thought he was. The entirety of our great, glorious past and our experiment in free love and peace isn't built on a lie, I've checked. There isn't another On The Road written by another Jack Kerouac that I have accidentally purchased. What it seems to be based on is the most misogynist and most disdainful and most self-absorbed and outright delusional reading of a book that had occurred in the entire Baby Boomer generation. Kerouac and his friends, all subjects of this book written in with their names changed, were deluded about their place in life, disdained the order that let them treat so many people so badly, and what they did to the women in their lives makes Don Draper and Roger Sterling look like Gloria Steinem's hard nosed instructors. These men were monsters who used people like objects and had the utter gall to appropriate the name of the Beat, originally a term used to describe black people "beaten to their socks," and apply it to their own over-privileged selves. Sal and Dean actually got up in the morning and thought that THEY were "beat."I encourage everyone to read this awful tome to awful men. I hope that you read it when you are 30 like me, or maybe just when you are mature enough to understand that what is happening here isn't a great adventure but a total abdication. I wish I had actually read this book in college. My father and I argued a lot when I was in school, when I knew he was so wrong and I was so knowing. The truth about Jack Kerouac and his friends is that even their best qualities fail to exceed my father's worst. For all his many faults, he has never, ever treated any human on this earth the way Sal and Dean treated every single person that had the misfortune to be on the road to Sal and Dean's kicks.Don't get me wrong, this book hasn't changed my political stripe. I'm not voting for Trump two years ago or two years from now. But Holy God, to think the young people who were going to "change the world" in my father's youth did so after reading this. It makes sense to me now, sitting here, why the #MeToo movement has ousted so many lefty men in Hollywood and the Senate, and even a lefty woman or two. I think, whether they read this book or not, they actually know what I knew until just earlier today.I'm sorry, dad.
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