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The important takeaway is that Kerouac was writing about real people with real lives and real challenges they had to face during real rough times in America. T

The important takeaway is that Kerouac was writing about real people with real lives and real challenges they had to face during real rough times in America. The opening lines of "On the Road" tell you everything you need to know: > I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. Philosophy and religion and ethics and morality and leisure and work and goals and success and failure—this is not what Kerouac was really writing about. He was writing about people and relationships as if they were a musical composition to be played and listened to, with friends and lovers as instruments participating in the song of life. He was not trying to achieve something but to fully live and experience the moment, to recapture the beauty and sadness of everything all at once. While Kerouac is more associated with Jazz, he was really an Impressionist, attempting to follow in the footsteps of Proust and Debussy.

joe_the_user 5y ago
The important takeaway is that Kerouac was writing about real people with real lives and real challenges they had to face during real rough times in America. While the people Kerouac wrote about were very real, I would just want to correct one thing. Kerouac wrote about people voluntarily or otherwise in the lower classes at a time (the 1950s) when things were relatively pretty good to be poor, you could get bare survival with little effort, the hassles were limited etc, that's why you could have amazing cultural creations coming out of that group, that's why a bit later the hippies were OK with voluntary poverty, etc.
- perrygeo 5y ago
  This is an important point to me. These people were living (by relative standards, absolutely thriving) with very little income, coasting on what a post-war, peak-cheap-oil society could provide. Sure, in their writing they occasionally questioned the status quo. But reading it in retrospect just highlights how materially lucky they were to have those crazy experiences. Road tripping across the US in search of something greater is a privledge; if I met Dean Moriarty and Jack Kerouac today, I'd probably give them an "OK Boomer" eye roll.
  - sammalloy 5y ago
    You’re right, but if you study history, you’ll discover that every generation has their own take on this phenomenon. #vanLife is just the latest version of it. Remember, Dean (Neil) transcended the Beats, became a member of the Merry Pranksters, and drove the bus for Kesey’s hippies who lived in it. It’s all connected.
- jeromegv 5y ago
  I'm not sure why you think that, poverty was high enough that Johnson thought necessary to start a war on poverty in 1964. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty
  - adolph 5y ago
    Johnson might have had fine political skills, but his strategic sense and application of war was a disaster.
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    The thing that's not obvious this is that Johnson began the War On Poverty because having the lower classes in poverty wasn't politically acceptable in that time (partly because of the Cold War). In contrast, the lower classes not being able to afford rent or health care today is essentially acceptable. This link [1] shows income inequality plateauing around 1950 and then rising sharply toward the late 1980s, reaching the levels of the 1920 at around 2010. [1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...
    - kingkawn 5y ago
      In other words, the American social safety net was politically necessary only because of the threat of the socialist alternative
      - asdff 5y ago
        Especially before Reagan began gutting programs, American democracy was almost like socialism-lite. Plenty of work to be found that paid living wages. Well funded government institutions and social programs, plenty of straight up communist jobs programs too although they would never be referred to as such (I consider something like NASA to be a communist entity as the people own the means of production in this agency). Jobs programs. Etc. It was a big mistake we didn't restart the WPA after WWII however and really incentivized this idea of finding work within the public government instead of private industry that serves the public on a contractual basis.

joe_the_user 5y ago

The important takeaway is that Kerouac was writing about real people with real lives and real challenges they had to face during real rough times in America. While the people Kerouac wrote about were very real, I would just want to correct one thing. Kerouac wrote about people voluntarily or otherwise in the lower classes at a time (the 1950s) when things were relatively pretty good to be poor, you could get bare survival with little effort, the hassles were limited etc, that's why you could have amazing cultural creations coming out of that group, that's why a bit later the hippies were OK with voluntary poverty, etc.

perrygeo 5y ago
This is an important point to me. These people were living (by relative standards, absolutely thriving) with very little income, coasting on what a post-war, peak-cheap-oil society could provide. Sure, in their writing they occasionally questioned the status quo. But reading it in retrospect just highlights how materially lucky they were to have those crazy experiences. Road tripping across the US in search of something greater is a privledge; if I met Dean Moriarty and Jack Kerouac today, I'd probably give them an "OK Boomer" eye roll.
- sammalloy 5y ago
  You’re right, but if you study history, you’ll discover that every generation has their own take on this phenomenon. #vanLife is just the latest version of it. Remember, Dean (Neil) transcended the Beats, became a member of the Merry Pranksters, and drove the bus for Kesey’s hippies who lived in it. It’s all connected.
jeromegv 5y ago
I'm not sure why you think that, poverty was high enough that Johnson thought necessary to start a war on poverty in 1964. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty
- adolph 5y ago
  Johnson might have had fine political skills, but his strategic sense and application of war was a disaster.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  The thing that's not obvious this is that Johnson began the War On Poverty because having the lower classes in poverty wasn't politically acceptable in that time (partly because of the Cold War). In contrast, the lower classes not being able to afford rent or health care today is essentially acceptable. This link [1] shows income inequality plateauing around 1950 and then rising sharply toward the late 1980s, reaching the levels of the 1920 at around 2010. [1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...
  - kingkawn 5y ago
    In other words, the American social safety net was politically necessary only because of the threat of the socialist alternative
    - asdff 5y ago
      Especially before Reagan began gutting programs, American democracy was almost like socialism-lite. Plenty of work to be found that paid living wages. Well funded government institutions and social programs, plenty of straight up communist jobs programs too although they would never be referred to as such (I consider something like NASA to be a communist entity as the people own the means of production in this agency). Jobs programs. Etc. It was a big mistake we didn't restart the WPA after WWII however and really incentivized this idea of finding work within the public government instead of private industry that serves the public on a contractual basis.