The following entry was written by READ and Writing Magazine's new Associate Editor, Audra Pace.
"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 common place thing, but burn burn burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."
This is my favorite quote from On The Road, so I wanted to jump right to it. If you don't know, 50 years ago today, a book called On The Road was published. It was written by Jack Kerouac, a Beat Generation forerunner. If you don't know about the Beat Generation, quietly read this article, and then pretend you already knew. Play it cool, because that's what most of the Beats spent their time doing ... being cool. Like, real cool daddy-o.
Yeah, they talked like that.
The Beat Generation MVPs include Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Ken Kesey, and William Burroughs, among others. One of the reasons Kerouac's On The Road is famous is because it chronicled the impossibly cool goings-on of many members of the beat tribe.
But what were they all about? The Beats were a band of artists and writers who rebelled against strict, traditional American society that immediately followed World War II. They went west, they hitchhiked. They partied hard but they also held all night poetry readings. Much of their writing aligns with transcendentalist ideas about nature and freedom. They were hippies before hippies were hippies.
On The Road mostly tells the story of Neal Cassady's life, and his hitchhiking travels with Kerouac across Route 6. Cassady's character is named Dean Moriarty, and Kerouac's character is named Sal Paradise. Other Beats show up in the novel, too. Allen Ginsberg is played by a character named Carlo Marx.
Kerouac bought one long, continuous roll of type paper, and typed out the novel without changing pages, indenting paragraphs, or breaking up lines or chapters. What can we say? Beats certainly weren't big on following rules, even grammatical ones. Fortunately for the reader, it was cleaned up by the time it was published in 1957, but the "stream of consciousness" feeling still prevails.In reading On The Road, you actually get inside the main character's head. The story of how On The Road was crafted is fascinating.
So, on the 50th birthday of the release of this novel, I say, check it out. Get in on it, and pretend you've been in on it all along, man.
Remember Me