On the Road by Jack Kerouac is list in the top 100 of teachers favourite books as featured in a Times Educational Supplement poll

On the Road by Jack Kerouac is listed in the top 100 of teachers favourite books as featured in a Times Educational Supplement poll




On the Road portrays the story of a fierce personal quest for meaning and belonging. This comes at an interesting point in American history when conformity was praised and outsiders were suspect. The Beat Generation arose out of a time of intense conflict, both internally and externally.
The issues of the Cold War, the Second Red Scare and McCarthyism took center stage of the cultural arena in the 1950s. As Americans bunkered down against communism at home and abroad, the sentiment of unifying and banding together led to extreme measures of censorship and control.
The Cold War was the backdrop for this fight. In a short time after defeating Germany, the Soviet Union fell from ally to threat in the eyes of the United States. In the postwar reconstruction process, the two powers found themselves continually at odds. The sentiment arose clearly as a struggle between two opposing ways of life. Contention over Soviet support for alleged communist revolution in Iran, then Turkey and Greece, led to the American policy of containment and the Truman Doctrine. Before a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947, President Harry S. Truman stated, "I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support the people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."^[4] That summer, Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed a plan for the economic reconstruction of Europe. While Western European countries planned how to go about rebuilding with American help, the Soviets walked away and forced the Eastern European countries to do the same. A Soviet aid and recovery plan followed for these countries and would mark the beginning of a punch and counterpunch pattern that would typify the early years of the Cold War. This laid a foundation for the tension that would define the period.^[4]
During this time, the Second Red Scare and fear of McCarthyism brought the culture of fear into the homes of average Americans. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), founded in 1938 by Congressman Martin Dies (D-TX), supported an attack on Hollywood professionals that resulted in a blacklist of writers, actors, and directors. The impact of the hearings, however, spread beyond Hollywood, and contributed to the sense of paranoia that paralyzed America in the 1950s. Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) added to this fervor when he began his crusade against communists he claimed had infiltrated the federal government. Starting with the State Department until allegations he made against military members brought him down, McCarthy used extreme tactics of argument to discredit professionals and ruin careers. This only extended the present culture of fear and reinforced the importance of conformity.^[4]
It was in this climate that some individuals of the young generation were seeking meaning outside the mainstream worldview. Amidst all the conflict and contradiction, the Beats were seeking out a way to navigate through the world. As John Clellon Holmes put it, "Everywhere the Beat Generation seems occupied with the feverish production of answers—some of them frightening, some of them foolish—to a single question: how are we to live?"^[5]
The idea of what it means to be "beat" is still difficult to accurately describe. While many critics still consider the word "beat" in its literal sense of "tired and beaten down," others, including Kerouac himself promoted the generation more in sense of "beatific" or blissful.^[6]
Holmes and Kerouac published several articles in popular magazines in an attempt to explain the movement. In the November 16, 1952 New York Times Sunday Magazine, he wrote a piece exposing the faces of the Beat Generation. "[O]ne day [Kerouac] said, 'You know, this is a really beat generation' ... More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and ultimately, of soul: a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself."^[7] He distinguishes Beats from the Lost Generation of the 1920s pointing out how the Beats are not lost but how they are searching for answers to all of life's questions. Kerouac's preoccupation with writers like Ernest Hemingway shaped his view of the beat generation. He uses a prose style which he adapted from Hemingway and throughout On the Road he alludes to novels like The Sun Also Rises. "How to live seems much more crucial than why."^[7] In many ways, it is a spiritual journey, a quest to find belief, belonging, and meaning in life. Not content with the uniformity promoted by government and consumer culture, the Beats yearned for a deeper, more sensational experience.
Holmes expands his attempt to define the generation in a 1958 article in Esquire magazine. This article was able to take more of a look back at the formation of the movement as it was published after On the Road. "It describes the state of mind from which all unessentials have been stripped, leaving it receptive to everything around it, but impatient with trivial obstructions. To be beat is to be at the bottom of your personality, looking up."^[5]
At the time of publication, On the Road was not the first book to criticize contemporary American culture. A nonconformist sentiment characterized the arts and popular culture of the 1950s as a way of rejecting societal norms. Many of the best selling books of the time achieved this same mission.^[4]
J. D. Salinger produced the first shock to the tranquil suburban landscape with the publication of The Catcher in the Rye in 1951. His protagonist Holden Caulfield struck a chord with young readers also at odds with the adult world. Caulfield's rejection of the regimentation and "phoniness" of the world around him resonated with the struggle for meaning that drove the Beat Generation. Salinger's rejection of traditional middle-class values signaled the first widely recognized public stand against the cultural conformist pressure.^[4]
Among the best-selling novels of 1950s was Peyton Place by Grace Metalious. Published in September 1956, it managed to be the second most sold book in the country that year and then to top the chart in 1957. In fact, it went on to be the best-selling book in American history up to that point.^[8] Often cited as the prime example of the decline in American culture of the decade, the novel examines the traditional values of a New England mill town by introducing the complications of extramarital sexual affairs. A book that received a broad range of reviews after publication, Peyton Place's popularity shows that popular culture was ready for a break from their traditional expectations.^[8]
Another popular contemporary was Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) that dealt with the increasing suburbanization of American society. Tom Rath struggles with the dilemma of following his conscience or pursuing the big salary and lush lifestyle typically portrayed of the 1950s family. In the end, though, he discovers that he can have both. While Wilson can be seen as chastising the societal norms at times, he concludes with his character achieving them. This shows the dichotomy of attitudes toward the middle-class values of the day.^[9]

 

The scroll, exhibited at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts, summer 2007

Kerouac often promoted the story about how in April 1951 he wrote the novel in three weeks, typing continuously onto a 120-foot roll of teletype paper.^[10] Although the story is true per se, the book was in fact the result of a long and arduous creative process. Kerouac carried small notebooks, in which much of the text was written as the eventful span of road trips unfurled. He started working on the first of several versions of the novel as early as 1948, based on experiences during his first long road trip in 1947. However, he remained dissatisfied with the novel.^[11] Inspired by a thousand-word rambling letter from his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac in 1950 outlined the "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" and decided to tell the story of his years on the road with Cassady as if writing a letter to a friend in a form that reflected the improvisational fluidity of jazz.^[12]
The first draft of what was to become the published novel was written in three weeks in April 1951 while Kerouac lived with Joan Haverty, his second wife, at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan, New York. The manuscript was typed on what he called "the scroll"—a continuous, one hundred and twenty-foot scroll of tracing paper sheets that he cut to size and taped together.^[13] The roll was typed single-spaced, without margins or paragraph breaks. In the following years, Kerouac continued to revise this manuscript, deleting some sections (including some sexual depictions deemed pornographic in the 1950s) and adding smaller literary passages.^[14] Kerouac authored a number of inserts intended for On the Road between 1951 and 1952, before eventually omitting them from the manuscript and using them to form the basis of another work, Visions of Cody.^[15] On the Road was championed within Viking Press by Malcolm Cowley and was published by Viking in 1957, based on revisions of the 1951 manuscript.^[16] Besides differences in formatting, the published novel was shorter than the original scroll manuscript and used pseudonyms for all of the major characters.
Viking Press released a slightly edited version of the original manuscript on 16 August 2007 titled On the Road: The Original Scroll corresponding with the 50th anniversary of original publication. This version has been transcribed and edited by English academic and novelist Dr. Howard Cunnell. As well as containing material that was excised from the original draft due to its explicit nature, the scroll version also uses the real names of the protagonists, so Dean Moriarty becomes Neal Cassady and Carlo Marx becomes Allen Ginsberg, etc.^[17]
In 2007, Gabriel Anctil, a journalist of the Montreal's daily Le Devoir discovered, in Kerouac's personal archives in New York, almost 200 pages of his writings entirely in Quebec French, with colloquialisms. The collection included ten manuscript pages of an unfinished version of On the Road, written on January 19, 1951. The date of the writings makes Kerouac one of the earliest known authors to use colloquial Quebec French in literature.^[18]