Anniversary Of "on The Road" Today

[sean]

Via The Writer's Almanac

 

It was on this day in 1957 that Jack Kerouac's book On the Road was published (books by this author). His inspiration for the book came ten years earlier. He was living in New York City with his mother, trying to write his first novel, when he met a drifter named Neal Cassady, an ex-convict from Denver who had actually been born in a car, and who became a car thief when he was fourteen years old. By the time Kerouac met him, Cassady had stolen more than five hundred cars and had been arrested ten times. Kerouac later wrote, "All my other current friends were intellectuals ... [but Cassady] was a wild yea-saying overburst of American Joy." more ...

 

Sean

[Wayfarer64]

A very cool thing to know for today!

It reminds me that my father claimed he had talked with Kerouac many times at a bar in the Village, (NYC)-Twas The Kettle of Fish where he bought me my first beer (in a bar) when I was 15 or so... (He knew I'd taken a few "trips" by then -& he had also - we had talked about the experience) - so what the hell was a beer...

Anyway all my pops would say was that Kerouac was a great story teller... I figured he had been too drunk to remember much. Or maybe he had lied to impress me...My father Stuart was a very troubled drunken lout most of the time who treated his kids like shit, but that was a great moment we shared nonetheless...

I also saw Kerouac on the Johnny Carson show in the early sixties before I knew who he was...Still I always remembered the guy in a lumber-jack shirt obviously drunk and pretty obnoxious to Carson et al...

I read just about everything he wrote except the first book-"the town & the country" or some such I just couldn't dig it after reading most of his other stuff first.

Several years later I met Allen Ginsberg a few times through his moms' best friends' grand kid, who was coincedentally the nephew of Man Ray -the lower East side Jewish comunity was pretty tight I guess... and also through a student of his, years later who now has given me a poetry reading in NYC this week...

So thats my free-form bop prosidy 'bout Jack Kerouac... Letting the words flow like a jazz riff without much time or judgment to pause into...( I did go back for the typos)

NO ONE could/can do it as well as he did- even if Capote called it "typing" -not writing... I for one love the books he wrote. That he became a fat right-wing drunken mess is just plain sad.

[Wayfarer64]

It's the birthday of Ken Kesey, (books by this author) born in La Junta, Colorado (1935). He moved to Oregon as a kid, where his father became a successful dairy farmer. Kesey did well in school. He was a champion wrestler and voted most likely to succeed by his high school graduating class. He studied communications in college and married his high school sweetheart and considered a career as a Hollywood actor before accepting a fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University. Among his classmates were the poet Wendell Berry and the novelist Larry McMurtry.

 

He wasn't much of a bohemian himself until a psychology student told him about a CIA-funded experiment being conducted at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park. For $75 a day, they would inject you with drugs that were supposed to simulate insanity and then they would ask you to describe your experience. Kesey thought that sounded interesting, so he signed up, and became one of the first Americans to be exposed to a new drug called LSD.

 

The experience changed his life. He became deeply interested in the nature of sanity and insanity, and took a job as the night attendant on the psychiatric ward of a hospital. That experience helped inspire his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962).

 

The fella that links these two men -Kerouac and Kesey was of course Cassady...One of the true American Free-spirits of the past century. The original Bum of Bums-the Holy Goof!

These three were the breakers of molds and strictures that went on to beget the 60's as we would have remembered them if we hadn't been there...

God Bless them one and all...

Edited September 17, 2006 by Wayfarer64