Salon.com > Jack Kerouac

Kerouac: Angel-headed hipster

Sun, 12 May 2013 16:30:00 +0000

Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

— Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

The FRANCO-AMERICAN WRITER JACK KEROUAC (1922–1969) is one of the most identifiable and branded of his generation. There are already more than half a dozen extensive biographical treatments, and many of his letters have now been published, including Road Novels, 1957–1960, his Complete Poems in the Library of America series (2007, 2012) and The Portable Jack Kerouac (1995). Why do we need a substantial new look at the author now, that largely ends late in 1951 with the completion of his best-known book, On the Road, which did not actually appear until 1957 when his oeuvre was blossoming but his melancholy decline began?

Where are the women Kerouacs?

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 22:28:00 +0000

In the November 2012 GQ I wrote an essay detailing some of my experiences as a teenage hitchhiker. The article, “The Truck Stop Killer,” focused on a ride I had hitched with a possible serial killer who, I believe, had murdered other girls and was going to murder me. The piece also described some of what it was like living in truck stops, sleeping in two-hour shifts, avoiding violence daily, and experiencing the country peripherally, through the lens of the interstate.

Much of my investigation for GQ hinged on finding some record of a girl left dead in a dumpster in the summer of 1985. She was a teenage hitchhiker, and I had been there when her body was found. Two days later, a truck driver picked me up hitchhiking and led me to believe that he had killed her. He then pulled over to the side of the road, took out a huge knife and told me to get into the back of the truck—he was going to kill me. I was able, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, to escape into the woods. But I did not go to the police. I did not go for help. These were also some of the questions I was exploring through my essay.

Was Jack Kerouac really a hack?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

In December, a film adaption of Jack Kerouac’s "On the Road" will hit theaters — featuring Viggo Mortensen, Kristen Stewart, Garrett Hedlund and Kirsten Dunst — providing two great literary opportunities: introducing Kerouac to a new audience, and reexamining the author's legacy in literature.

When "On the Road" was published by Viking in 1957, Jack Kerouac became an overnight sensation, a literary figure who was met with the kind of polarizing emotions of disdain and love that, today, one would have to look to sports to find the worthy contemporary comparison (i.e., LeBron James or Tim Tebow). His fame came, in part, from a New York Times book review by Gilbert Millstein, which hailed the book's publication as a "historic occasion." Millstein wrote, “in so far as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion.” Millstein compared "On the Road" to Ernest Hemingway’s "The Sun Also Rises," because both works introduced cultural movements: the Beat Generation and the Lost Generation.