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In July 1947, Jack Kerouac began the part of his life he called his "life on the road." His purpose, according to a letter to friend Hal Chase, was to know the United States as he knew "the palm of [his] hand." "My subject as a writer is of course America," claimed Kerouac, "and simply, I must know everything about it." In Kerouac, biographer Ann Charters likens Kerouac to "the American pioneers a hundred years before." According to Charters, Kerouac "wanted to come as close as possible to their style and their experience of the West." Ten years after Kerouac first set out for the Bear Mountain Bridge, Viking published On the Road. Cited as "an historic occasion" by New York Times reviewer Gilbert Millstein, the publication of Kerouac's second novel marked a new beginning for the Beat movement. Almost instantly,
Jack Kerouac became a "romantic hero, an archetypal rebel, the symbol of
[his generation's] own vanities, the symbol of their romantic legend."
And "as he wrote it down the legend became, finally, the one reality of
his life." Thus, although On the Road is a work of fiction,
it is also a memoire of Kerouac's road experiences. This site attempts
to merge these experiences with those of Kerouac's narrator, Sal Paradise,
by taking On the Road for a ride.
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Recreating
Sal and Jack's Journey
Jack Kerouac's
America
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Kerouac's
New York
Kerouac's Denver Kerouac's San Francisco Letters From the Road America Responds to On the Road: Reviews from Across the Nation Bibliography |
