The Poverty Jet Set

‘On the Road’ Turns 50

Neil Cassady and Kack Kerouac

50 years published, that is. It hasn’t been duly noted in the mainstream press that Kerouac wrote the book during the later 1940’s and carried the manuscript around with him for years before anyone would publish it. Kinda makes me think people are capitalizing on the Kerouac ‘brand’ to sell more books they once hated and found too edgy. Hmmm… Nah. They’d never do that. I wonder, though. Would Kerouac have been a blogger? A digital self-publisher?

The consummate starving artist. An American icon. And of course, one of my greatest heroes! If you’re way into Kerouac like I am, yet haven’t read Ann Charter’s Kerouac biography, treat yourself! It’s a great read in its own right and really brings to light the life and times of the beats and all their awesome real-life adventures.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 1:29 pm and is filed under adventure, books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Audrey 08/15/2007 02:50 PM 1 point
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Didn't he originally write On the Road on one long scroll-like piece of paper that he could roll up and carry around? Ann Charter's Kerouac biography IS really interesting. I read a copy of it that you lent me, but it was falling apart, and by the time i got halfway through the book it was completely unbound.

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Jimmy CraicHead 08/15/2007 10:02 PM 1 point
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Oh I so tried to get into this book back in 1981 or so but I thought it was so yadda yadda. I asked another Drexel classmate at the the time and he agreed that it was another road trip experience that we had all been doing all along. I need to re read this book, more in the context of what I've learned in the last 25 years and more importantly, what I've learned what USA was like before all the highways were built. My generation is so jaded!
Jimmy Craic Head

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nat 08/16/2007 08:04 AM 1 point
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Synchronous as usual, my current hero du jour is the guy on the left, Jack's inspiration for this book, Neal Cassady. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Cassady

Not that I plan on becoming the fastest man alive, or even sampling many pharmies ending in "edrine", but Neal still rocks!

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joshua 08/16/2007 02:29 PM 1 point
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my friend got me a book of his haiku poetry and some of them were incredible.

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magdalenus 08/18/2007 09:22 PM 1 point
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I love Neal Cassady, too, of course. My friend Jim McAvoy used to call me Neal Cassady all the time when I lived in Telluride and would drive through Boulder where he lived and crash on his couch all the random time.

That reminds me about how I've always meant to write about the time I was traveling through San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico, where he died. Hmmm...

I've seen that Haiku poetry, somewhere. I'd love to read some of them again!

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