How Jack Kerouac’s On the Road Influenced Generations

Jack Kerouac's On the Road is Considered a Defining Work of Fiction Post WWII

A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.

― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

In 1995, I was a twenty-three-year-old college dropout living partially at home, partially at friends’ parents’ apartments, in my white Gran Prix, and basically anywhere I’d partied the night before. I had gone to community college for a few semesters, taking whatever basic courses I was supposed to take, and working at restaurants when I wasn’t. I was a line cook at Chilis and Roadhouse Grill, with a stint at Steak and Ale (which served warm dark bread with butter in a dining room as dark as a movie theater). Steak and Ale went bankrupt in 2008, but apparently one just opened up last year in a place called Burnsville, Minnesota. If you’re in Burnsville, check it out—they still have the wedge salad, the stuffed mushrooms, and my favorite: the spinach artichoke dip. The outside of the place no longer looks like a Tudor-inspired pub but rather the modern type of stacked rectangles eatery you’d see staring out a Wyndham hotel, which is exactly what the new Steak and Ale looks like and where it’s located. I have no comment about that. What I do have a comment about is how, like so many others, starting in 1957, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac’s novel, On the Road, changed the course of my life. Literally.

Jack Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922, to French-Canadian parents, and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts in a French-speaking home. He served in the U.S. Merchant Marines during WWII, where he’d begun (and completed) his first novel, The Sea is My Brother, which was published posthumously in 2011. The Town and the City, his first published novel, came out in 1950, followed by his most famous novel, and the one that changed the trajectory of my life, On the Road, was published in 1957. That novel, about Kerouac’s cross-country adventures with Neal Cassady, known in On the Road as Dean Moriarty, was a pivotal moment in American Literature. The novel established Kerouac as the leader of the “Beat Generation,” the term being credited to Kerouac but initially introduced to the Beat writers by Herbert Huncke, a street hustler, writer, and poet in conversation with John Clellon Holmes, author of the novel Go. Go is considered the first “Beat” novel. If you’re like me, you’ve read every single book you can by all the writers considered “Beat” writers.

The month after I read On the Road, which Kerouac famously wrote on eight long sheets of tracing paper which he taped together into a continues 120 foot scroll, I sold my prized Gran Prix (prized because it had dark tinted windows, 6x9 speakers, and shiny rims that were all the rage in Miami, Florida, at the time), all of my possessions (except my books), broke up with a long-term girlfriend, and jumped in a friend’s car heading West to work as a cook in Yellowstone National Park. It’s also when, on that first day in the car, the open road ahead of me, that I started my first real novel, a riff on Kerouac’s On the Road called Two Down Beats. The novel was one hundred percent imitation, but I completed it, and I still have that little, yellow-paged spiral 5.8 × 8.3 notebook somewhere amongst the pictures of all my travels since. Two Down Beats was my practice novel. If you’re a writer, you know what I’m talking about. It’ll never see the light of day. But I’m proud of it. It’s the one that got me on my life-long journey to writing, the only thing I’ve ever not been able to abandon doing no matter what’s going on in my tumultuous life.

Kerouac’s novel is music, in particular jazz music. It is a novel that captures the thrill of heading “West,” the way Americans have always had a thrill for heading West. There is a sense of adventure in that journey, especially for East Coasters like me. We’re going from tall buildings and traffic, dense populations of people and a lack of wild animals to what we feel is open country, and everything that those words imply. Before we’d crossed over the Florida/Georgia line, my little yellow notebook had taken its place atop the dashboard, where it would remain burning under the sun from Miami until, eventually landing in San Diego, California, months later.

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 commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

--Jack Kerouac, On the Road

That a book, that words on a page, could thrust me into a world I had never considered, was thrilling. It was invigorating. There were tears from the woman I had left behind. There were doubts I would have enough money to make it past a few states. There were massive questions that hung over me: what the hell are you doing, and why are you doing it? But just like Neal Cassidy and Sal Paradise, Kerouac’s narrator (based on Kerouac himself), the road called and it was stronger than anything I had ever experienced. I wanted to live in that counterculture Sal Paradise spoke about. I wanted to live that unconventional lifestyle they lived. I despised conventional existence and nowhere jobs where you sat behind a desk or sold real estate to people who could actually afford the purchase of a home. I may have not used hard drugs, but damn it if I didn’t enjoy the smell of a nice joint or the taste of a good rum and coke. I wanted the freedom Sal Paradise lauded. I yearned for the hope of a different kind of life where whatever chains existed for a young man heading out into the world did not exist, or were at least broken apart the way Superman did it whenever he raced off to save Lois Lane or Jimmy Olsen from some impending doom. If Sal and Neal could do it, I thought, so can I.

I am not the only writer (or artist, for that matter), to have been influenced and motivated by Kerouac’s classic. It is said that musicians such as Jim Morrison of the Doors, Bob Dylan (who said the book “changed his life,” and The Beatles all read and took heed of the lessons imparted by the characters in the book. Other “Beatnik” writers (and Kerouac friends), as well as their contemporaries such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Diane di Prima, William Least Heat-Moon, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and the late Dan Wakefield, one of my creative writing professors at Florida International University and the author of Going All the Way, which was later made into a movie with Ben Affleck and Rachel Weisz and Rose McGowan, spent time on their own works based on not only the novel On the Road but many of Kerouac’s other works.

A Young Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac During His Merchant Marine Days in WWII

Kerouac’s (and On the Road’s) legacies will be forever remembered for the impact they’ve had on literature, and the counterculture they were a part of during the 1940s and 1950s. There is a Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist-inspired, non-sectarian liberal arts university in Boulder, Colorado, that’s “recognized as the birthplace of the mindfulness movement.” There is a granite, commemorative sculpture in Lowell, Massachusetts, with “excerpts from his writings and a path shaped like a cross and circles, symbolizing his spiritual beliefs.” And there are countless movies and plays and books based on Kerouac’s works, but also tributes by Kerouac’s friends and admirers honoring all that Kerouac, in his brief forty-seven years on this earth, exist as a testament to his contribution to literature and the culture(s) he inspired and participated in creating.

There are many books that have influenced my writing (and me) as I have matured into the writer I have become today. Dostoevsky. Mailer. Matthiessen. Hemingway. Orwell. Shakespeare. Dickens. Cervantes. But there’s only one novel, one work of literature, that got me going, that had me take action, and that work was Kerouac’s On the Road. Over the years, I have traveled to many places. I try to visit national parks, where I worked in my youth. I travel abroad. And every now and then, sticking out of a backpack or tucked in someone’s back pocket, I see a familiar cover, and I know what it is, and I know why it is that that person feels the need to hold that book so closely to their person. To cherish that book like no other. To need to have the words contained within resonating around the inside of their head like a rattle calling them to action. Kerouac’s On the Road will forever be the searchers call to action. I’m happy that it was mine. And that is how Jack Kerouac’s On the Road Influenced Generations, mine included.

Cully Perlman, Author of The Losses

Cully Perlman is author of The Losses, a novel. He is also a blogger and Substantive Editor. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com