Detour #338: On The Road with Jack Kerouac, USA
Jack Kerouac criss-crossed America to write On the Road - the seminal novel for the beat generation. Here’s how to follow his route.
The driving adventures that inspired On The Road actually took place between 1947 and 1950 when Kerouac and his pal Neal Cassady set out on a journey of discovery. Mixing with musicians, poets and drug pushers in the immediate post-war era, Kerouac encountered, and later describe, an America that was previously in the shadows.
When he came to put words to paper in 1951 the process was just as fevered as his drives had been. The original manuscript is a 120 foot long scroll, typed over three weeks, uninterrupted by punctuation, and fuelled by Benzadrine and caffeine. It took until 1957 to be published, but when it was, On The Road soon became a best-seller.
Photo Christie’s
In On The Road protagonists Sal Paradise (Kerouac) and Dean Moriarty (Cassady) take no less than four different road trips and fan Julien Nègre has created a brilliant interactive route map (below), which charts them all.
Part One is perhaps the most notorious drive in the book, where Sal leaves New York for California with only $50 and a “stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America.”
Departing New York, Paradise heads north west to the shores of Lake Erie. “It was an ordinary bus trip with crying babies and hot sun, and countryfolk getting on at one Penn town after another, till we got on the plain of Ohio and really rolled, up by Ashtabula and straight across Indiana in the night,” writes Kerouac.
He passes through Chicago, past the penitentiary at Joliet, then to Rock Island. “And here for the first time in my life I saw my beloved Mississippi River, dry in the summer haze, low water, with its big rank smell that smells like the raw body of America itself because it washes it up.”
Next up is Davenport, Iowa, and Iowa City, before he reaches Des Moines where: “I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon."
Into Nebraska, then Wyoming and Denver Colorado where Kerouac noted: “the road is life,” and onwards via Salt Lake City (“a city of Sprinkers”), Nevada and into California to San Francisco.
The journey then continues south to Los Angeles on “the fastest, whoopingest ride of my life. We made Sabinal to LA in the amazing time of four hours flat about 250 miles.” Then it’s eastwards again through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania. “I slept all the way to Pittsburgh. I was wearier than I'd been for years and years. I had three hundred and sixty-five miles yet to hitchhike to New York, and a dime in my pocket."
When he finally arrives back where he started Kerouac writes: “I had travelled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York.”
The America of Kerouac may have changed in the 75 years since he wrote On The Road but it still calls out to roadtrippers everywhere. Even today the road is life.
Photo Francisco Gonzalez / Unsplash
ROADBOOK
CLASS: Literary drive
NAME: ON the Road with Kerouac
ROUTE: new York to San Francisco to New Tork
COUNTRY: USA
Distance: 8,000 Miles
Jack Kerouac criss-crossed America to write On the Road - the seminal novel for the beat generation. Here’s how to follow his route.