“Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent in the office or mowing the lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain,” wrote Jack Kerouac in his groundbreaking novel, On the Road, a road-trip anthology based on his years spent traveling thousands of miles of interstate highways newly built in the U.S. after World War II.
Kerouac had enrolled at Columbia University on a football scholarship in 1940. However, after breaking his leg during a game, he gave up football to become a writer. Kerouac’s journals from his college years indicate he had read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. And according to a 2010 New Yorker article, the title of Kerouac’s book may have been inspired by a Thoreau passage that reads: “The traveler must be born again on the road.”
Both Walden, published in 1856, and On the Road, which followed it a century later in 1957, are stream of consciousness descriptions by each author of their quests for self-discovery, authenticity, freedom from the conventions of conformist society, and the purpose of life. However, Thoreau’s exploration was a solo endeavor living in a cabin near a pond in Massachusetts. Kerouac turned this formula on its head as in his stories he is continually moving by automobile over vast distances, and is joined in many of his adventures by his captivating travel buddy, Dean Moriarty.
On the Road opened the eyes of a generation of young adult readers in the 1950s to a world outside the American mainstream. Kerouac’s lyrical prose captured the allure—as well as the hardships and misery—of open-ended travel, wild parties, dive bars, and other previously taboo topics. His book became intertwined with the Beat Generation literary movement and its search for the answers to life’s questions. And through it and a dozen additional novels he authored, Kerouac was a significant influence on a number of 1960s icons, including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Doors.
Kerouac apparently viewed himself not so much a glamorous bohemian, but as a modern-day mystic seeking spiritual truth. He wrote: “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”
