America Responds to On the Road:
Reviews from Across the Nation

Reviews

"Everything Moves, But Nothing Is Alive," Commonweal, September 1957:
"This is an exciting book to read; it meets head-on all the difficulties which confront the novelist today and surmounts them.  It promotes admiration as well as disagreement."
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"Flings of the Frantic," Newsweek, September 9, 1957:
"In the end, the only thing that prevents On the Road from careening headlong off into the trash heap is the sheer impetus of novelist Kerouac's fast-tempoed, bop-beat prose."
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"The Ganser Syndrome," Time, September 9, 1957:
"...Kerouac has a Wolfelike love of the U.S. and a Whitmanesque weakness for cataloguing nearly every experience. His novel is partly an ingenuous travel book, partly a collection of journalistic jottings about adventures that are known to everyone who has ever hitchhiked more than a hundred miles in the U.S. The books' importance lies in Author Kerouac's attempt to create a rationale for the fevered young who twitch around the nation's jukeboxes and brawl pointlessly in the midnight streets."
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"Reader's Choice," Atlantic Monthly, October 1957:
"Mr. Kerouac has a distinctive style, part severe simplicity, part hep-cat jargon, part baroque fireworks. He uses each of these elements with a sure touch, works innumerable combinations and contrasts with them, and never slackens the speed of his narrative which proceeds, like Dean at the wheel, at a steady hundred and ten miles an hour."
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Harpers, October 1957:
"Home-made mysticism has produced a lot of bad writing, and Kerouac's book has most of the characteristic faults....Yet On the Road has a good deal more to say than the 297th novel about a vice president who wants to be a president or the 410th novel about decadence on the old plantation. There is vigor in the book, and a wide-openness to experience that keeps it alive."
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Playboy, November 1957:
"[On the Road] is a disturbing book, a sharpie's travelog full of literary Weltschmerz, jazz slanguage and the frenetic doings of a bunch of sensitive, pathetic--but interesting--cats.
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"Hip, Cool, Beat--and Frantic," The Nation, November 16, 1957:
"Despite its drag race of words and gestures, On the Road does nothing, thinks nothing, acts nothing, but yet manages to be a book after all--a loving portrait of hip Dean Moriarty and his beat, cool friends as they run 110 miles an hour in order to stand still.  It's a frantic book, and for that reason thee is hope for Jack Kerouac."
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"Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation," Esquire, March 1958:
Kerouac explains the purpose of the Beats as well as their legacy.
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"King of the Beats," Commonweal, January 2, 1959:
"What sets Kerouac apart from the "writer writers," and makes his voice carry despite its comparative frailty and childishness, is that he has the courage to put down the unaccustomed rhythym and details of the frantic modern scene exactly the way he's lived it.  This may not be a literary achievement which will survive beyond the present.  But can we be sure what will?
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"The Origins of the Beat Generation," Playboy, June 1959:
Kerouac describes the Beats and their beginnings.
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"The Great Western Bus Ride," Esquire, March 1970:
In "The Great Western Bus Ride," Kerouac goes on the road once again.
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"Beatnik: The Magazine for Hipsters," Mad, September 1960:
"Mad presents its version of a magazine written by the Beat Generation which really defends the movement...the movement to abolish it!"
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"Living it Up With Jack Kerouac," Chicago Tribune, October 6, 1957:
"Kerouac possesses a powerful talent, but it is as yet completely uncontroled. He can slip from magniloquent hysteria into sentimental bathos, and at his worst he merely slobbers words. His best, however, makes it clear that he is a writer to watch."
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Reviews

"Books of the Times," New York Times, September 5, 1957:
"On the Road is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Keroauc himself named years ago as "beat," and whose principal avatar he is. Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the "Lost Generation," so it seems certain that On the Road will come ot be known as that of the "Beat Generation."
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"In Pursuit of Kicks," New York Times Book Review, September 8, 1957:
"Jack Kerouac has written an enormously readable and entertaining book but one reads it in the same mood that he might visit a sideshow--the freaks are fascinating although they are hardly part of our lives....On the Road is a stunning achievement. But it is a road, as far as the characters are concerned, that leads nowhere--and which the novelist himself cannot afford to travel more than once."
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"Restless Rebels in Search of--What?" New York Herald Tribune, September 15, 1957:
"Quite apart from its characterizations, which are given and illustrated rather than developed, the chief distinction of this novel is its sentimental emotion. Certainly, On the Road is a romantic treatment of delinquency and, as such, is considerable interest."
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"Cozzens and Others," Hudson Review, Winter 1957-1958:
"The book's claims have to be acknowledged: one of our Quality Magazines speaks of it as a work of great vigor and drive, and, considering its author's relations with the West Coast howlers, to ignore it would be to ignore a New School....Plainly this kind of writing makes it readers feel badly--not crude, to be sure (distinctions are possible at any level), but rather (putting it with precision) like a slob running a temperature of 103.6."
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"Back to the Village--But Still on the Road," Village Voice, September 18, 1957:
Kerouac comments on the popularity of On the Road, as well his West Coast following.
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"The Beat Debated--Is It or Is It Not?" Village Voice, November 19, 1958:
Discussion of the Hunter College Playhouse's debate, "Is There a Beat Generation," including Kerouac's contributions.
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"Jack Kerouac: Off the Road, Into the Vanguard, and Out," Village Voice, December 25, 1957:
Account of Kerouac's visit to the Village Vanguard.
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"On the Sidewalk," New Yorker, February 21, 1959:
John Updike's own version of On the Road.
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Virginia Quarterly Review, 1958:
"Out of the bubble and squeak of [Kerouac's] turbulent prose it is possible to discern the pathetic despair, anxiety, and frustrations characteristic of our age, at least among egocentric young people, content to substitute sensations of the moment for experience, prudence, or self-discipline."
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"Vocal, the Frantic Fringe," Washington Post, September 8, 1957:
"Throbbing, undirected and irresponsible energy is the distinguishing characteristic of this second novel by [Kerouac]....If he does not over-experience, does not rush too fast, if he develops some direction and purpose, he will blast his own niche in the pyramid of American letters."
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"Three Novels," Tamarack Review (Toronto, Canada), August 1958:
"[On the Road] is a literary curiosity, an extraordinary tour de force, which attempts to put into words longings and needs unsuccessfully ignored by our civilization, except perhaps in its music.  It is an ironical paradox that for most of the characters most of the 'kicks' they get from life come from motion in a powerful car, from the most familiar symbol of the civilization they reject."
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"The Beat Boys," Sunday Times (London), May 28, 1958:
"Already in a secure niche in the American literary vernacular, [the word "beat"] may very likely catch on on this side with the publicatin of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. For Kerouac is the chronicler--if not indeed the prophet--of the beat generation. And his picareque, biting and sometimes mystical book is the required text."
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"New Novels," Listener (London), May, 29, 1958:
"Before he is halfway through the book, the reader, dragged helplessly at the tail of Dean's car, feels like dropping off and having a quiet sleep in the nearest ditch. If he remains giddily on the track, it is probably because this is in its way a good travel book which does give a vivid impression of teh sweep and variety of the North American continent."
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"Adolescence and Maturity," Encounter (London), August 1958:
"Mr. Kerouac writes like a poster-artist of the old school, in crude, slapped-on primary colours.  His "Method" lacks all subtlety and precision, and what is in his characters is not life but the jerking, galvanic activity of marionettes....There is no development, and although the prose is obviously meant to be pretty hot stuff it is lacking all wit, irony, objectivity, or sympathy, and for all its torrent of words is about as expressive as a series of neanderthal grunts."
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Meanjin (Victoria, Australia), December 1959:
"[On the Road is not] a work of great artistic merit, nor is it an articulate manifesto.  But it renders protest, important protest, of a kind that is truly frightening."
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