What is it? - After dropping out of Columbia University*, Jack Kerouac traveled around the country meeting the other Beat Generation figures during 1947-1950. What is the Beat Generation? It was a literary movement wherein the central figures tried to find new meaning in life post WW2 through hitting the road, exploring their sexuality, drug use, jazz, Buddhism, and Daoism. On the Road is a roman à clef** about these few years, with the first draft famously being written in a three week period afterwards on a massive 120 foot scroll of paper, all single spaced with no margins or paragraph breaks. Many were not a fan, with famed author Truman Capote saying "That's not writing, that's typing" after reading the novel. But yet, it spoke to a lost generation, becoming the catalyst for countless people to hit the road themselves in search of something raw and real.
*-Pretty amusingly, much of Columbia's notable "alums" are dropouts, including Alexander Hamilton, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, and Amelia Earhart
**-A novel about real life events presented as fiction. Think The Bell Jar or No Longer Human.
On the Road is a novel about jazz. There's a melancholy dripping off of nearly every page, but the ones that are purely joyful are the ones where main characters Sal and Dean are at jazz clubs. Even in its inception, the novel is jazz: Kerouac wrote frantically in those three weeks in his apartment, putting down whatever came into his head to try and capture the pure emotions of moments. A common complaint of the novel is that it's repetitious, the characters travel across the country in much the same way multiple times throughout the book. This, too, is jazz, arrangements constantly reimagined and reinterpreted but retaining the same core. So what do we do with the hollowness of this core? How do we deal with the fact that through all the drugs and sex and thousands of miles on the road, Sal and Dean fail to find the truth that they're looking for? At the release of the novel, Phoebe Lou Adams of The Atlantic says the novel "disappoints because it constantly promises a revelation or conclusion of real importance and general applicability, and cannot deliver any such conclusion". But yet, it's exactly this unanswered question that makes the novel so enduring and haunting. All it leaves you with is a blueprint and no answers and all you can do is go on the road to come to your own conclusion.
SCORE - 8.5/10 - Must Read
LENGTH - 307 pages
EDITION - I read the Penguin Classics edition with an excellent introduction by Ann Charters