On the Road, In Your Face

September 05, 2007

Filed in: The Way We Live Now

Speaking of 50ths, On the Road was published 50 years ago today. There have been about 2 bazillion words already published on the subject of the anniversary, so I’ll try to keep my remarks brief and personal.

Like many, many other readers of On the Road, maybe all of them?, I fell in love with Kerouac’s rushing prose at a young and impressionable age. Mostly I loved On the Road because I was hanging out at the time with my wild, wild friend T, who was totally Dean Moriarty for the 1980s, complete with the requisite party-drug habits, late-night drives with the headlights off, brushes with the cops, binge drinking, etc. etc.

Then it all died for me. My college advisor talked me into a senior honors project, and, fool that I was, I insisted on writing about Kerouac. By the end of the semester, I was well and truly convinced the man was a hack and a fraud and overrated in the extreme. To be fair, I felt the same way about both my advisor and myself. The three of us parted ways, forevermore I thought.

But now, lo these many years hence, I do suddenly have a hankering to read On the Road again, partly because I’m planning a couple of road trips myself, as readers of this blog might already be aware, but partly because of this excellent review by Luc Sante of the original, unedited manuscript that was in the NYT book review a few weeks back.

Maybe today somewhere in upstate New York my unnamed advisor will read that it’s OTR‘s anniversary, and he’ll pause and think, God, remember that whiny student who wrote the world’s worst paper on Kerouac? I wonder whatever happened to her.