Luc Sante : On the Road Again

Reviews Jacques Kerouac, On the Road : The Original Scroll, edited by Howad Cunnell (Viking), at The NY Times (19.08.2007) :

A writer sufficiently attuned to an idea can find all the materials required for its fulfillment lying around in the street. Kerouac, a working-class French Canadian boy from Massachusetts who won a football scholarship to Columbia but decided before long that he was less interested in sports than in writing, had given evidence of his obsession with the road as early as 1940. Meeting Neal Cassady, though, made it possible for him to write the mid-20th century’s answer to “Huckleberry Finn.” Cassady, with his need to move, his vast yahooing enthusiasm and his insatiable priapic drive, could have stepped out of Western legend. That he compulsively stole cars instead of guiding wagon trains and achieved enlightenment in bebop clubs rather than medicine lodges was merely a function of history. But he wasn’t a primitive, and was rather more than a found object. He read books and wrote sometimes spectacular letters, and he was more on top of the zeitgeist than his big-city admirers. He was a born hero and a euphoric lover of the world, who gave the Beats their soul, saving them — if just barely — from choking on their own mysticism.

In relation with Neal Cassady.

Also see Jonah Raskin, "Kings of the Road", The Nation (30.07.2007 Issue), and Alicia Rebensdorf, "50 Years on, Kerouac's 'On The Road' Reveals the Beatnik as a Tender, Geeky Romantic", AlterNet (21.08.2007).