5 ms·

Jack Kerouac, Malcolm Cowley, and the difficult birth of On the Road

80 points by samclemens 1y ago

dyauspitr 1y ago
Once I found out the beats were mostly gay it changed how I viewed them much as I didn’t want it to change how I viewed them. I even read all of William Burroughs and thought he was the only in the group but he wasn’t.
- hyrix 1y ago
  Just a couple of bros, traveling the countryside in each other's company. History is full of such roommates. Just the other day we were thinking about how recent generations have gotten more conservative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734620 The author proposes that it may reflect the incredible stability we've enjoyed in recent decades, which rewards more conservative "life planning": > Our super-safe environments may fundamentally shift our psychology. When you’re born into a land of milk and honey, it makes sense to adopt what ecologists refer to as a “slow life history strategy”—instead of driving drunk and having unprotected sex, you go to Pilates and worry about your 401(k). People who are playing life on slow mode care a lot more about whether their lives end, and they care a lot more about whether their lives get ruined. Everything’s gotta last: your joints, your skin, and most importantly, your reputation. That makes it way less enticing to screw around, lest you screw up the rest of your time on Earth.
  - watwut 1y ago
    That article plays very loose with what is or was "weird" or "deviance". It ignores things in which new generation is different from ours and somehow manages to ma frame things that were normal (alcohol drinking) as deviance.
- johnnienaked 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 1y ago
    Can you please make your substantive points more thoughtfully? "What the hell are you talking about" is too aggressive for the curious conversation we're trying for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - johnnienaked 1y ago
      Sure. Stating the authors of the Beat novels, despite many of them being married to women, were "mostly gay" isn't curious conversation though. It's an obviously false conjecture not based in evidence.
      - dang 1y ago
        That may well be so, but we need you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but everyone here) to follow the rules even when another comment is wrong or bad. Otherwise we end up in a downward spiral. There's actually an interesting reason for that: we all underestimate the provocations in our own posts and overestimate the provocations in other people's posts. If the skew is 10x each way then that's a 100x perception gap. Since more or less all comments suffer from this baseline bias, we need to compensate for it by doing extra work to stay within the guidelines. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%2210x%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
        johnnienaked 1y ago
        Fair enough I will. I agree with what you said about underestimating provocations
metalman 1y ago
It is a good thing that on the road exists, it tells a vivid truth about america that many millions have experienced but very few put down in words My grandmother left NYC in 1929 with 3 other recently graduated nurses and drove a model A ford to california when there were still patches of prairy that had to be driven over, and in the 90's I drove there useing mostly back roads, bought a school bus in Vancouver for $50, and drove it back to Nova Scotia, though ended up chatting with Keasy at the country fair....got invited to the farm, but was in a hurry going south got a copy of on the road in a cleminites box, with a stack of state maps from the time it was written that I found all perfectly preserved in the rafters of my shop
- acuozzo 1y ago
  > it tells a vivid truth about america that many millions have experienced but very few put down in words The similarly-titled "The Road" by Jack London does the same for an earlier America. It's one of my favorite books.
- jonjacky 1y ago
  I gather that the pre-freeway 1940s and 1950s were the great age for road trips in America -- for all kinds of people, including the very non-bohemian. I read somewhere that the mathematician John von Neumann drove across the country over twenty times in the late 40s and early 50s -- between Princeton and Los Alamos, I would guess. I also read that in the late 40s some of Norbert Wiener's grad students drove from Boston to Mexico City for a cybernetics conference --- they were gone for months! Earlier, in the 1930s, there was the migration of Oakies from the dust bowl to California, as described in The Grapes of Wrath, which, come to think of it, is another road novel. In 1957 my family, a young couple with two little kids, moved from Wisconsin to Seattle, driving in our Plymouth station wagon, camping along the way. I was very young but I recall stopping for a flash flood, and another time we had to stop for a cattle drive that was crossing the highway, driven by actual cowboys on horseback! I remember it as one of the great adventures of my life.
  - jonjacky 11mo ago
    Story idea: on one of his many cross-country drives to Los Alamos, von Neumann stops into a remote diner out West where he runs into ... Kerouac and the others on one of their On The Road journeys! They get to talking, and von Neumann tells them about game theory, quantum mechanics, and computers --- which they have never heard of before. Kerouac writes about the encounter in one of his early On The Road drafts but it is removed by the editors who worry they might get in trouble for revealing atomic secrets because von Neumann hinted at plans to build the H-bomb.
WD-42 1y ago
On The Road was an inspiration to me in high school. I ended up doing a solo road trip around the west coast when I was 17. Met some interesting people. Mostly it was quiet. Not nearly the excitement I had hoped from the open road. I’m not sure if it was his writing as much as the idea of him that I was infatuated with. Anyway, thanks Kerouac.
- tims33 1y ago
  Exactly the same. I loved Dharma Bums much more as a book, but On the Road certainly changed the course of my life. I'd always been made to wander, but never fully understood it.
- johnnienaked 1y ago
  [flagged]
- galaxyLogic 1y ago
  I read it at 14 and it hit home with me right away. But then I recommended it to my then friend and she didn't get it. She said "nothing happened in it". And I can see her point now there was no plot, just wandering. To me, there were "scenes" I could imagine myself having liked to be part of, like the guys traveling on truck-bed drinking whisky to keep cold away. I wonder if it was more a "guy's novel" than for girls?
  - mock-possum 1y ago
    With the way girls were treated by the guys in the novel? Yeah, totally. A certain kind of guys’ novel, anyway. Not my kind, as I was disappointed to discover.
    - philipallstar 1y ago
      "Only misogynists could like this novel" is pretty reductive.
      - 1y ago
rmason 1y ago
I have long adored Kerouac and devoured everything he wrote as well as all the biographies about him. Thanks for posting this article, it was a pure delight to get some insight into the seldom covered battle to publish the book.
dang 1y ago
I went down an epic rabbit hole the other day—a rabbit labyrinth really—learning about what happened to the children of the Beats. It started here: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/10/24/the-female-picaresque-jan-kerouacs-baby-driver/ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/10/24/the-female-pi... That's an intro to a novel by Jan Kerouac—Jack's daughter—which is newly reprinted. It (the intro) is well written and her (Kerouac's daughter's) story is incredible. That led me to this classic piece, "Children of the Beats", written in 1995 by the son of one of Kerouac's lovers: https://web.archive.org/web/20220408162741/https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/05/magazine/children-of-th-beats.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220408162741/https://www.nytim... He tracked down and interviewed several of his literary 'cousins': other children of Beat writers and scenesters. If, like me, you are fascinated by how the lives of artists intertwine with family dynamics, that article is unputdownable. And profoundly sad. All of this material is tragic. Through that I started reading about Lucien Carr, the golden boy of the Beats who had been their lead shaman—a few years before Neal Cassady showed up—until he stabbed a man to death under murky circumstances that a Hacker News comment is too short to get into: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Carr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Carr That led me to reading about the children of Lucien Carr, one of whom—Caleb Carr—was a military historian who later became an accidental celebrity by writing "The Alienist", a 90s classic of the historical-serial-killer genre. Caleb Carr became an excellent writer, though as far from a Beat as a writer could be. He talks about the trauma field that he and his peers grew up in with painful eloquence. https://www.salon.com/1997/10/04/cov_si_04carr/ https://www.salon.com/1997/10/04/cov_si_04carr/ He said this about his father and his buddies Ginsberg and Burroughs: "The one thing that their lifestyle did not factor in was family." To hear about that milieu from a child who had to deal with it all, decades later, is to me a entirely compelling thing. He used the money from his bestsellers to buy a small mountain in rural New York and built himself an 18th century manor house refuge: https://web.archive.org/web/20150529181658/https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/12/garden/caleb-carr-rebuilding-the-past-in-words-and-wood.html https://web.archive.org/web/20150529181658/https://www.nytim... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCrt8Pir7jA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCrt8Pir7jA He died last year a month after his last book came out. His publishers thought they were getting another serial killer bestseller. Instead he delivered a memoir about his cat, whom this interviewer pushes him to agree was the love of his life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zqGaXl1Zg0#t=173 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zqGaXl1Zg0#t=173 His mother left Lucien Carr and married a man who had three daughters, who grew up with Lucien's three sons in what Caleb (middle son) called a "dark Brady Bunch". Lucien lived for 11 years with Alene Lee, another former lover of Kerouac, and her daughter. A few years ago a blogger who is into Beat history did this interview with her (the daughter), which of all these pieces is probably the saddest, and which again I couldn't stop reading. If you can read this without your heart feeling assaulted, you're more resilient than I am: https://lastbohemians.blogspot.com/2022/04/christina-mitchell-diamente-on-her.html https://lastbohemians.blogspot.com/2022/04/christina-mitchel... The last rabbit-subhole I went down was the story of the son of William Burroughs, also named William Burroughs, who also wrote drug-phantasmagoric novels (one called "Speed"), had a liver transplant before he was 30, and died at the side of a road in Florida: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs_Jr. I was never attracted to the Beats aesthetically, except for Burroughs in a cobra-hypnotized way. But the mythology of the Beats as Bohemian free spirits has carried a lot of sway. There's a principle that the shadow side of the artist works itself out in the family. If you ever wanted to learn how this works, the Beat constellation is quite the case to study. Here is what the son of Neal Cassady, the icon of beatific spontaneity, said in the 1995 interview I linked to above: "By the 60's, Dad was so burned out, so bitter," John Allen says. "He told me once that he felt like a dancing bear, that he was just performing. He was wired all the time, talking nonstop. I remember once, after a party, about 2 A.M., he went in the bathroom, turned on the shower and just started screaming and didn't stop. I was about 15 then and I knew he was in deep trouble, that he was really a tortured soul. He died not too long after that."
johnnienaked 1y ago
Good book. I never laughed louder or smiled wider than the part where he becomes a Mexican cotton picker.
cm2012 1y ago
Jack Kerouac was quite misogynistic in real life and this unfortunately comes through in his work. Makes it hard to read.
- kerabatsos 1y ago
  Many great authors are deeply flawed people. Tolstoy was not a good person, and Steinbeck was a complete a-hole. The list is long. But the classics they create are no less classic. https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/features/john-steinbeck-author-anniversary-death-of-mice-and-men-grapes-wrath-east-eden-a8690851.html https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/fea... https://www.rbth.com/history/330411-why-leo-tolstoy-was-terrible-husband/amp https://www.rbth.com/history/330411-why-leo-tolstoy-was-terr...
  - lukan 1y ago
    "Tolstoy was not a good person" Because he did not cheat on his wife, like it was common, but told her from the beginning, that he is not monogamous and she should make up her mind, whether she can accept that? That is not a flaw in my book. And that he left household chores to her? Well, depends how things were agreed between them, but since his dayjob was writing .. I think that article overall presents a very weak case.
    - watwut 1y ago
      > And that he left household chores to her? "all this was also on Sophia’s shoulders, including the village’s clinic, which she paid to organize. Last but not the least, Sophia was her husband’s scribe, secretary and literary agent. She even consulted Anna Dostoevsky, another great writer’s wife who was responsible for her husband’s literary business. Sophia understood the perplexing handwriting of her husband and rewrote and edited many of his works. She copied the entire text of War and Peace seven times." Household chores is massively underselling it. Like common, give her credit for everything she had done, which was quite a lot more then just household chores. > Because he did not cheat on his wife, like it was common, but told her from the beginning She was 18, he was 34 and he gave her his diaries with all the details to read. And he in fact broke the promisses he gave to wife (not to cheat with women in the village). Overall he does come across as a low key asshole even if we ignore cheating as a fair play.
pseingatl 1y ago
Tsk, tsk: the author of this piece fails to mention the long-lost--but recently found--Joan Anderson letter, written by Neal Casady. Kerouac himself attributed Casady's style in the letter to helping him find a style appropriate to Road. Kerouac considered the letter to be a literary masterpiece in its own right and arranged to have Ginsberg, then affiliated with Ace paperbacks, to submit it for publication. Ginsberg sent the only copy to a friend in San Francisco to be submitted to a little press in San Francisco and then invented a story about the letter--at this point legally a manuscript?--being lost overboard off a houseboat. The little press went out of business. Ginsberg’s lie probably discouraged any effort to find the letter. When the little press went out of business, the landlord dumped its office’s contents left behind in the building’s lobby. An accountant working in the building went through this garbage and carried some of it home, where it found a place in his attic. Fast forward forty years. The accountant dies. His daughter comes to clean out her father’s house. She asks a friend to help. They find a box and an envelope: Casady’s Joan Anderson letter. The Kerouac Estate is quite a legal mess. A Florida court found that a purported will was fraudulent, but I'll leave that issue aside because the Estate has been a good steward of Kerouac's writing--unlike the Joyce Estate. Complicated rules attach to letters. A physical letter is the property of the recipient, but IP rights remain in its author, as J.D. Salinger found out when his letters went up for auction. Salinger was saved by Peter Norton--you may have heard of his "Utilities" who bought the letters and gave them to Salinger. Casady's heirs have a claim. Other rules apply to manuscripts. This one was thrown in the trash and California has rules that vest ownership in anyone who finds treasure in someone else’s disposed-of trash, such as the accountant. A Sotheby’s auction was halted at the last minute. A settlement was reached among the parties and the letter now is archived at Emory University.
narrator 1y ago
I read On the Road, and I think the most annoying thing about that book was how they had an enormous focus around funding their road trip and all the things they had to do to get money. Maybe that was all the plot they had, but it just felt weird.
zbyforgotp 1y ago
Destroying high trust society is a lot of fun.
- GlibMonkeyDeath 1y ago
  A concise 9 word summary of OTR. As a young person, I found the idea of just running around with your friends, doing whatever, and not trying to be "productive" in any way, intoxicating. After I got a little older, though, I identified more with people left in the wake of destruction (e.g., the guy who owned the new car they were driving across the country for delivery.)
- dyauspitr 1y ago
  We’re done with that, the GOP is now having fun destroying the medium trust society.
- dang 1y ago
  OK, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
lucraft 1y ago
Slate Star Codex's review is always worth a re-read https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-roa...
- cafard 1y ago
  Harsh, but not, in my recollection, wrong.
sharadov 1y ago
On the road was terrible writing, Kerouac a misogynistic drunk - I believe the reason it became that popular was that it captured Americana at a time when some freethinkers realized their parents' ways were too stifling
douglasgloria 1y ago
[dead]

80 points by samclemens 1y ago

Once I found out the beats were mostly gay it changed how I viewed them much as I didn’t want it to change how I viewed them. I even read all of William Burroughs and thought he was the only in the group but he wasn’t.

hyrix 1y ago
Just a couple of bros, traveling the countryside in each other's company. History is full of such roommates. Just the other day we were thinking about how recent generations have gotten more conservative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734620 The author proposes that it may reflect the incredible stability we've enjoyed in recent decades, which rewards more conservative "life planning": > Our super-safe environments may fundamentally shift our psychology. When you’re born into a land of milk and honey, it makes sense to adopt what ecologists refer to as a “slow life history strategy”—instead of driving drunk and having unprotected sex, you go to Pilates and worry about your 401(k). People who are playing life on slow mode care a lot more about whether their lives end, and they care a lot more about whether their lives get ruined. Everything’s gotta last: your joints, your skin, and most importantly, your reputation. That makes it way less enticing to screw around, lest you screw up the rest of your time on Earth.
- watwut 1y ago
  That article plays very loose with what is or was "weird" or "deviance". It ignores things in which new generation is different from ours and somehow manages to ma frame things that were normal (alcohol drinking) as deviance.
johnnienaked 1y ago
[flagged]
- dang 1y ago
  Can you please make your substantive points more thoughtfully? "What the hell are you talking about" is too aggressive for the curious conversation we're trying for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - johnnienaked 1y ago
    Sure. Stating the authors of the Beat novels, despite many of them being married to women, were "mostly gay" isn't curious conversation though. It's an obviously false conjecture not based in evidence.
    - dang 1y ago
      That may well be so, but we need you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but everyone here) to follow the rules even when another comment is wrong or bad. Otherwise we end up in a downward spiral. There's actually an interesting reason for that: we all underestimate the provocations in our own posts and overestimate the provocations in other people's posts. If the skew is 10x each way then that's a 100x perception gap. Since more or less all comments suffer from this baseline bias, we need to compensate for it by doing extra work to stay within the guidelines. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%2210x%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
      - johnnienaked 1y ago
        Fair enough I will. I agree with what you said about underestimating provocations

metalman 1y ago

It is a good thing that on the road exists, it tells a vivid truth about america that many millions have experienced but very few put down in words My grandmother left NYC in 1929 with 3 other recently graduated nurses and drove a model A ford to california when there were still patches of prairy that had to be driven over, and in the 90's I drove there useing mostly back roads, bought a school bus in Vancouver for $50, and drove it back to Nova Scotia, though ended up chatting with Keasy at the country fair....got invited to the farm, but was in a hurry going south got a copy of on the road in a cleminites box, with a stack of state maps from the time it was written that I found all perfectly preserved in the rafters of my shop

acuozzo 1y ago
> it tells a vivid truth about america that many millions have experienced but very few put down in words The similarly-titled "The Road" by Jack London does the same for an earlier America. It's one of my favorite books.
jonjacky 1y ago
I gather that the pre-freeway 1940s and 1950s were the great age for road trips in America -- for all kinds of people, including the very non-bohemian. I read somewhere that the mathematician John von Neumann drove across the country over twenty times in the late 40s and early 50s -- between Princeton and Los Alamos, I would guess. I also read that in the late 40s some of Norbert Wiener's grad students drove from Boston to Mexico City for a cybernetics conference --- they were gone for months! Earlier, in the 1930s, there was the migration of Oakies from the dust bowl to California, as described in The Grapes of Wrath, which, come to think of it, is another road novel. In 1957 my family, a young couple with two little kids, moved from Wisconsin to Seattle, driving in our Plymouth station wagon, camping along the way. I was very young but I recall stopping for a flash flood, and another time we had to stop for a cattle drive that was crossing the highway, driven by actual cowboys on horseback! I remember it as one of the great adventures of my life.
- jonjacky 11mo ago
  Story idea: on one of his many cross-country drives to Los Alamos, von Neumann stops into a remote diner out West where he runs into ... Kerouac and the others on one of their On The Road journeys! They get to talking, and von Neumann tells them about game theory, quantum mechanics, and computers --- which they have never heard of before. Kerouac writes about the encounter in one of his early On The Road drafts but it is removed by the editors who worry they might get in trouble for revealing atomic secrets because von Neumann hinted at plans to build the H-bomb.

WD-42 1y ago

On The Road was an inspiration to me in high school. I ended up doing a solo road trip around the west coast when I was 17. Met some interesting people. Mostly it was quiet. Not nearly the excitement I had hoped from the open road. I’m not sure if it was his writing as much as the idea of him that I was infatuated with. Anyway, thanks Kerouac.

tims33 1y ago
Exactly the same. I loved Dharma Bums much more as a book, but On the Road certainly changed the course of my life. I'd always been made to wander, but never fully understood it.
johnnienaked 1y ago
[flagged]
galaxyLogic 1y ago
I read it at 14 and it hit home with me right away. But then I recommended it to my then friend and she didn't get it. She said "nothing happened in it". And I can see her point now there was no plot, just wandering. To me, there were "scenes" I could imagine myself having liked to be part of, like the guys traveling on truck-bed drinking whisky to keep cold away. I wonder if it was more a "guy's novel" than for girls?
- mock-possum 1y ago
  With the way girls were treated by the guys in the novel? Yeah, totally. A certain kind of guys’ novel, anyway. Not my kind, as I was disappointed to discover.
  - philipallstar 1y ago
    "Only misogynists could like this novel" is pretty reductive.
    - 1y ago

rmason 1y ago

I have long adored Kerouac and devoured everything he wrote as well as all the biographies about him. Thanks for posting this article, it was a pure delight to get some insight into the seldom covered battle to publish the book.

dang 1y ago

I went down an epic rabbit hole the other day—a rabbit labyrinth really—learning about what happened to the children of the Beats. It started here: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/10/24/the-female-picaresque-jan-kerouacs-baby-driver/ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/10/24/the-female-pi... That's an intro to a novel by Jan Kerouac—Jack's daughter—which is newly reprinted. It (the intro) is well written and her (Kerouac's daughter's) story is incredible. That led me to this classic piece, "Children of the Beats", written in 1995 by the son of one of Kerouac's lovers: https://web.archive.org/web/20220408162741/https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/05/magazine/children-of-th-beats.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220408162741/https://www.nytim... He tracked down and interviewed several of his literary 'cousins': other children of Beat writers and scenesters. If, like me, you are fascinated by how the lives of artists intertwine with family dynamics, that article is unputdownable. And profoundly sad. All of this material is tragic. Through that I started reading about Lucien Carr, the golden boy of the Beats who had been their lead shaman—a few years before Neal Cassady showed up—until he stabbed a man to death under murky circumstances that a Hacker News comment is too short to get into: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Carr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Carr That led me to reading about the children of Lucien Carr, one of whom—Caleb Carr—was a military historian who later became an accidental celebrity by writing "The Alienist", a 90s classic of the historical-serial-killer genre. Caleb Carr became an excellent writer, though as far from a Beat as a writer could be. He talks about the trauma field that he and his peers grew up in with painful eloquence. https://www.salon.com/1997/10/04/cov_si_04carr/ https://www.salon.com/1997/10/04/cov_si_04carr/ He said this about his father and his buddies Ginsberg and Burroughs: "The one thing that their lifestyle did not factor in was family." To hear about that milieu from a child who had to deal with it all, decades later, is to me a entirely compelling thing. He used the money from his bestsellers to buy a small mountain in rural New York and built himself an 18th century manor house refuge: https://web.archive.org/web/20150529181658/https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/12/garden/caleb-carr-rebuilding-the-past-in-words-and-wood.html https://web.archive.org/web/20150529181658/https://www.nytim... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCrt8Pir7jA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCrt8Pir7jA He died last year a month after his last book came out. His publishers thought they were getting another serial killer bestseller. Instead he delivered a memoir about his cat, whom this interviewer pushes him to agree was the love of his life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zqGaXl1Zg0#t=173 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zqGaXl1Zg0#t=173 His mother left Lucien Carr and married a man who had three daughters, who grew up with Lucien's three sons in what Caleb (middle son) called a "dark Brady Bunch". Lucien lived for 11 years with Alene Lee, another former lover of Kerouac, and her daughter. A few years ago a blogger who is into Beat history did this interview with her (the daughter), which of all these pieces is probably the saddest, and which again I couldn't stop reading. If you can read this without your heart feeling assaulted, you're more resilient than I am: https://lastbohemians.blogspot.com/2022/04/christina-mitchell-diamente-on-her.html https://lastbohemians.blogspot.com/2022/04/christina-mitchel... The last rabbit-subhole I went down was the story of the son of William Burroughs, also named William Burroughs, who also wrote drug-phantasmagoric novels (one called "Speed"), had a liver transplant before he was 30, and died at the side of a road in Florida: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs_Jr. I was never attracted to the Beats aesthetically, except for Burroughs in a cobra-hypnotized way. But the mythology of the Beats as Bohemian free spirits has carried a lot of sway. There's a principle that the shadow side of the artist works itself out in the family. If you ever wanted to learn how this works, the Beat constellation is quite the case to study. Here is what the son of Neal Cassady, the icon of beatific spontaneity, said in the 1995 interview I linked to above: "By the 60's, Dad was so burned out, so bitter," John Allen says. "He told me once that he felt like a dancing bear, that he was just performing. He was wired all the time, talking nonstop. I remember once, after a party, about 2 A.M., he went in the bathroom, turned on the shower and just started screaming and didn't stop. I was about 15 then and I knew he was in deep trouble, that he was really a tortured soul. He died not too long after that."

johnnienaked 1y ago

Good book. I never laughed louder or smiled wider than the part where he becomes a Mexican cotton picker.

cm2012 1y ago

Jack Kerouac was quite misogynistic in real life and this unfortunately comes through in his work. Makes it hard to read.

kerabatsos 1y ago
Many great authors are deeply flawed people. Tolstoy was not a good person, and Steinbeck was a complete a-hole. The list is long. But the classics they create are no less classic. https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/features/john-steinbeck-author-anniversary-death-of-mice-and-men-grapes-wrath-east-eden-a8690851.html https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/fea... https://www.rbth.com/history/330411-why-leo-tolstoy-was-terrible-husband/amp https://www.rbth.com/history/330411-why-leo-tolstoy-was-terr...
- lukan 1y ago
  "Tolstoy was not a good person" Because he did not cheat on his wife, like it was common, but told her from the beginning, that he is not monogamous and she should make up her mind, whether she can accept that? That is not a flaw in my book. And that he left household chores to her? Well, depends how things were agreed between them, but since his dayjob was writing .. I think that article overall presents a very weak case.
  - watwut 1y ago
    > And that he left household chores to her? "all this was also on Sophia’s shoulders, including the village’s clinic, which she paid to organize. Last but not the least, Sophia was her husband’s scribe, secretary and literary agent. She even consulted Anna Dostoevsky, another great writer’s wife who was responsible for her husband’s literary business. Sophia understood the perplexing handwriting of her husband and rewrote and edited many of his works. She copied the entire text of War and Peace seven times." Household chores is massively underselling it. Like common, give her credit for everything she had done, which was quite a lot more then just household chores. > Because he did not cheat on his wife, like it was common, but told her from the beginning She was 18, he was 34 and he gave her his diaries with all the details to read. And he in fact broke the promisses he gave to wife (not to cheat with women in the village). Overall he does come across as a low key asshole even if we ignore cheating as a fair play.

pseingatl 1y ago

Tsk, tsk: the author of this piece fails to mention the long-lost--but recently found--Joan Anderson letter, written by Neal Casady. Kerouac himself attributed Casady's style in the letter to helping him find a style appropriate to Road. Kerouac considered the letter to be a literary masterpiece in its own right and arranged to have Ginsberg, then affiliated with Ace paperbacks, to submit it for publication. Ginsberg sent the only copy to a friend in San Francisco to be submitted to a little press in San Francisco and then invented a story about the letter--at this point legally a manuscript?--being lost overboard off a houseboat. The little press went out of business. Ginsberg’s lie probably discouraged any effort to find the letter. When the little press went out of business, the landlord dumped its office’s contents left behind in the building’s lobby. An accountant working in the building went through this garbage and carried some of it home, where it found a place in his attic. Fast forward forty years. The accountant dies. His daughter comes to clean out her father’s house. She asks a friend to help. They find a box and an envelope: Casady’s Joan Anderson letter. The Kerouac Estate is quite a legal mess. A Florida court found that a purported will was fraudulent, but I'll leave that issue aside because the Estate has been a good steward of Kerouac's writing--unlike the Joyce Estate. Complicated rules attach to letters. A physical letter is the property of the recipient, but IP rights remain in its author, as J.D. Salinger found out when his letters went up for auction. Salinger was saved by Peter Norton--you may have heard of his "Utilities" who bought the letters and gave them to Salinger. Casady's heirs have a claim. Other rules apply to manuscripts. This one was thrown in the trash and California has rules that vest ownership in anyone who finds treasure in someone else’s disposed-of trash, such as the accountant. A Sotheby’s auction was halted at the last minute. A settlement was reached among the parties and the letter now is archived at Emory University.

narrator 1y ago

I read On the Road, and I think the most annoying thing about that book was how they had an enormous focus around funding their road trip and all the things they had to do to get money. Maybe that was all the plot they had, but it just felt weird.

zbyforgotp 1y ago

Destroying high trust society is a lot of fun.

GlibMonkeyDeath 1y ago
A concise 9 word summary of OTR. As a young person, I found the idea of just running around with your friends, doing whatever, and not trying to be "productive" in any way, intoxicating. After I got a little older, though, I identified more with people left in the wake of destruction (e.g., the guy who owned the new car they were driving across the country for delivery.)
dyauspitr 1y ago
We’re done with that, the GOP is now having fun destroying the medium trust society.
dang 1y ago
OK, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

lucraft 1y ago

Slate Star Codex's review is always worth a re-read https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-roa...

cafard 1y ago
Harsh, but not, in my recollection, wrong.

sharadov 1y ago

On the road was terrible writing, Kerouac a misogynistic drunk - I believe the reason it became that popular was that it captured Americana at a time when some freethinkers realized their parents' ways were too stifling

douglasgloria 1y ago

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