Thompson was also savage: “The man is an ass, a mystic boob with intellectual myopia,” a judgment he revised 40 years later, acknowledging that he “never would have become a writer were it not for On the Road… Kerouac was a great influence on me”.Īs with Ulysses, which inspired On the Road, and its author James Joyce, whom Kerouac aspired to emulate, it’s possible that Jack’s Beat bible remains among the great unread novels of our age. Kerouac’s fellow Beat Generation poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso (left and centre) and publisher Barney Rosset in New York in 1957, photographed by Burt Glinn Truman Capote, who doubtless felt Kerouac’s success might eclipse his own breakthrough with Breakfast at Tiffany’s, famously hissed: “That’s not writing, that’s typing”.

While Gilbert Millstein raved in The New York Times about “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat’ and whose principal avatar he is”, Norman Mailer thought it “lacked, discipline, honesty and a sense of the novel”. He’d made his debut seven years earlier with The Town and The City, more conventional but no less autobiographical, heavily influenced by Thomas Wolfe. Published in 1957, On the Road itself was Kerouac’s second novel. Only when the Kerouac archive was opened at the New York Public Library in 2006 was it revealed that he had written diaries, letters, drafts and even an entire novel – Sur Le Chemin, a precursor to On the Road – entirely in French. This March marks the centenary of the birth of Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, the second son of a French-Canadian family in Lowell, Massachusetts, a mill town known as “Little Canada”. (When in 1982 I flew west for the first time I was disappointed to discover that Salinas, birthplace of John Steinbeck, and namechecked in Kris Kristofferson’s Me and Bobby McGee, was essentially a large salad bowl.) Cheap air travel to the United States was only just beginning when I first encountered it so Tulsa, Phoenix, San Francisco, and other waystations of so many hit songs could only be imagined. And perhaps it’s true that you have to be barrelling across America, high on something, to get into the groove of Jack Kerouac’s plotless “spontaneous prose”.

On the road again jack kerouac