Still Vital Turns 50 on the Road Review
Nonetheless Vital, 'On the Road' Turns 50
The best-selling novels of 1957 included "Peyton Place" past Grace Metalious and "On the Route" by Jack Kerouac.
Both were cultural touchstones: "Peyton Place" as a precursor of the modern soap opera and "On the Road" as a clarion call for the Trounce generation and, later, as an hugger-mugger bible of the 1960s and '70s. Today "Peyton Place" is mostly regarded as a historical marvel, but "On the Road," celebrating the 50th ceremony of its publication, still has a vibrant life on college English grade syllabuses and high schoolhouse summer reading lists, and in young travelers' backpacks.
"It'south a book that has anile well," said Martin Sorensen, flooring manager at Kepler's Books and Magazines in Menlo Park, Calif. A "noticeable" number of copies are sold each year at the store, he said, "certainly more than than the boilerplate 50-year-old book."
The autobiographical, stream-of-consciousness "On the Route" follows Sal Paradise (a graphic symbol based on Kerouac) and Dean Moriarty (based on Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady) as they constitutional back and forth beyond the country, drinking, listening to jazz and having diplomacy.
Viking is releasing a 50th-anniversary edition on Th (the original came out Sept. 5, 1957), and is as well publishing, for the offset fourth dimension in book course, the original version that Kerouac typed on a 120-foot-long curl and a new analysis past John Leland, a reporter at The New York Times, titled "Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of 'On the Road' (They're Not What You Think)." The Library of America will include "On the Road" in a drove of Kerouac's "road novels" to be published next month. And the New York Public Library volition pay homage in November with an exhibition of the original curlicue and other materials from the Kerouac archives.
Although much of this will primarily appeal to Beat aficionados, "On the Road" continues to have a wider cultural significance, particularly for the young. Fueled in function by schoolhouse assignments, it sells about 100,000 copies a year in various paperback editions, co-ordinate to Viking. And while its era equally a counterculture standard-bearer may have passed (it'south hard to remain counterculture while beingness featured in Gap ads, equally Kerouac was in the 1990s), it has far outlasted many other cult classics.
Part of the reason for the novel's staying power is that popular artists go on referencing it. (A new motion-picture show version, directed by Walter Salles, who made "The Motorbike Diaries," is scheduled to become into product early on side by side year.) Everyone from Bob Dylan to the Beastie Boys has been inspired by Kerouac. More recently the Agree Steady, an indie stone group, quoted "On the Road" on its album "Boys and Girls in America."
With his bad-male child paradigm and untethered work ethic, Kerouac "is like the rock 'north' coil version of a writer," said Joe Landry, 31, the atomic number 82 singer for the Antecedents, a Portland, Ore., band. Like many other groups, the Antecedents list him equally an influence on their MySpace folio.
Erik Barnum, sales floor director at Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vt., says he ever keeps half dozen copies on manus, a much college number than for nigh older books. "It'due south a book that a bookstore has to have on the shelf or somebody's going to say, 'What do you mean yous don't have Kerouac'south 'On the Road?' " he said.
Simply keeping it on mitt can be hard: among volume-world insiders, "On the Route" is known to be a heavily shoplifted work, said Robert Contant, an possessor of St. Marking's Bookshop in Manhattan. Mr. Contant, who said he had sold 36 copies of the book since March — a number "virtually contemporary writers would envy" — keeps his copies in a instance about the information desk, so they can be monitored past employees. "It has a high street value because of the outlaw image," he said, "and for young people who come up to New York, there's a romantic notion near the beatnik era."
Epitome
Penny Vlagopoulos, a graduate pupil at Columbia Academy (Kerouac'southward alma mater) who teaches the book there and at New York University, said: "I still call up it's a rite-of-passage novel. The whole idea of the freedom of the open route is all the same very much alive for young people."
Michael Heslop, 30, says he get-go read "On the Route" every bit a senior in high school and rereads it every other year. In 2004, he opened Kafe Kerouac, a coffee shop, tape shop, bookstore and performance space in Columbus, Ohio. "I wanted to name information technology after an American author I admired," Mr. Heslop said. "Jack Kerouac felt like the essence of the undercover independent coffee store more than than a Hemingway or a Marker Twain." (He as well offers an unlikely Kerouac drink, a hazelnut mint latte. "It'south hard to proper noun manifestly black coffee after somebody," Mr. Heslop said.)
In true crush fashion, Kafe Kerouac plays host to poetry readings and open up mikes and draws a college oversupply. Nina Hernandez, 23, an employee at the cafe, first read "On the Road" a year ago. "I like that he wasn't about the rules, he just stripped that away and wrote what he was thinking," she said.
But Ms. Hernandez, an industrial engineering student, also said she hadn't heard of Kerouac until she began working at the buffet. And, she noted, the book was not without its flaws: "Sometimes I found information technology a little wordy."
In the academy, "On the Road" gets a mixed reputation. "I don't think the volume is taken seriously past most scholars and literary critics," said Pecker Roughshod, a senior lecturer in the English department at Northwestern University, where he has been teaching "On the Road" for two decades.
However, Mr. Roughshod said, his students connect with the book quite personally. "Undergraduates can really relate to information technology considering they live in such a mediated world with the Cyberspace, the cellphone and the iPod," he said. "There are so many ways in which you're non where you are and Kerouac is virtually being where yous are."
Some students, though, pass up the book as dated. Ann Douglas, a Beat out scholar who has been education it for more than than 25 years at Columbia, acknowledges that students don't have it as "gospel." They criticize it from all unlike angles, she said — finding it, for instance, condescending toward Mexicans or women.
But Ms. Douglas says that her seminar on the Beats regularly has six times as many applicants as at that place are spaces, and that the novel all the same resonates strongly, partly because she gives her students an assignment to write an autobiographical essay in the spontaneous style made famous by Kerouac.
"Again and again students do the best writing of their careers," she said. "It'southward a summons to put aside fear of what people will say or what your family unit expects and to discover a vocalization that is really their own."
At City Lights Books, the San Francisco literary landmark (it sells ane,000 copies of "On the Road" every year), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Beat poet and publisher and co-founder of the shop, mused on the continuing success of the volume.
Mr. Ferlinghetti, 88, contrasted Kerouac's work with Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Affections," which he said was "the kind of book that you read when you lot are 18 and it'due south just wonderful merely if you lot read it when you lot are 35 or 50 you are embarrassed by its over-romantic tone and its flowery exuberance." But having read "On the Road" when it beginning came out and he was in his 30s, and just last month, Mr. Ferlinghetti said, "Information technology is actually withal 'with it,' you might say."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/15/books/15kero.html
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