The best-selling novels of 1957 included Peyton Place by Grace Metalious and On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
Both were cultural touchstones: Peyton Place as a precursor of the modern soap opera and On the Road as a clarion call for the Beat generation and, later, as an underground bible of the 1960s and 1970s. Today, Peyton Place is mostly regarded as a historical curiosity, but On the Road, celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication, still has a vibrant life on college English course syllabuses and high school summer reading lists, and in young travelers' backpacks.
"It's a book that has aged well," said Martin Sorensen, floor manager at Kepler's Books and Magazines in Menlo Park, California. A "noticeable" number of copies are sold each year at the store, he said.
PHOTOS: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
The autobiographical, stream-of-consciousness On the Road follows Sal Paradise (a character based on Kerouac) and Dean Moriarty (based on Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady) as they ramble back and forth across the country, drinking, listening to jazz and having affairs.
Viking is releasing a 50th-anniversary edition today (the original came out Sept. 5, 1957) and is also publishing, for the first time in book form, the original version that Kerouac typed on a 37m-long scroll and a new analysis by John Leland, a reporter at the New York Times, titled Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of 'On the Road' (They're Not What You Think). The Library of America will include On the Road in a collection of Kerouac's "road novels" to be published next month. And the New York Public Library will pay homage in November with an exhibition of the original scroll and other materials from the Kerouac archives.
Although much of this will primarily appeal to Beat aficionados, On the Road continues to have a wider cultural significance, particularly for the young. Fueled in part by school assignments, it sells about 100,000 copies a year in various paperback editions, according to Viking. And while its era as a counterculture standard-bearer may have passed (it's hard to remain countercultural while being featured in Gap ads, as Kerouac was in the 1990s), it has far outlasted many other cult classics.
Michael Heslop, 30, says he first read On the Road as a senior in high school and rereads it every other year. In 2004, he opened Kafe Kerouac, a coffee shop, record store, bookstore and performance space in Columbus, Ohio. "I wanted to name it after an American writer I admired," Heslop said. "Jack Kerouac felt like the essence of the underground independent coffee shop more than a Hemingway or a Mark Twain." (He also offers an unlikely Kerouac drink, a hazelnut mint latte. "It's hard to name plain black coffee after somebody," Heslop said.)
In true beat fashion, Kafe Kerouac plays host to poetry readings and open mikes and draws a college crowd. Nina Hernandez, 23, an employee at the cafe, first read On the Road a year ago. "I like that he wasn't about the rules; he just stripped that away and wrote what he was thinking," she said.
But Hernandez, an industrial engineering student, also said she hadn't heard of Kerouac until she began working at the cafe. And, she noted, the book was not without its flaws: "Sometimes I found it a little wordy."
In the academy, On the Road gets a mixed reputation. "I don't think the book is taken seriously by most scholars and literary critics," said Bill Savage, a senior lecturer in the English department at Northwestern University, where he has been teaching On the Road for two decades.
Still, Savage said, his students connect with the book quite personally. "Undergraduates can really relate to it because they live in such a mediated world with the Internet, the cell phone and the iPod," he said. "There are so many ways in which you're not where you are, and Kerouac is about being where you are."
Some students, though, reject the book as dated. Ann Douglas, a Beat scholar who has been teaching it for more than 25 years at Columbia, acknowledges that students don't accept it as "gospel." They criticize it from all different angles, she said - finding it, for example, condescending toward Mexicans or women.
But Douglas says that her seminar on the Beats regularly has six times as many applicants as there are spaces, and that the novel still resonates strongly.
"Again and again, students do the best writing of their careers," she said. "It's a summons to put aside fear of what people will say or what your family expects and to find a voice that is really their own."
At City Lights Books, the San Francisco literary landmark, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Beat poet and publisher and co-founder of the store, mused on the continuing success of the book.
Ferlinghetti, 88, contrasted Kerouac's work with Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, which he said was "the kind of book that you read when you are 18 and it's just wonderful, but if you read it when you are 35 or 50 you are embarrassed by its over-romantic tone and its flowery exuberance." But having read On the Road when it first came out and he was in his 30s, and just last month, Ferlinghetti said, "It is really still 'with it,' you might say."
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In the aftermath of the 2020 general elections the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had crushed them in a second landslide in a row, with their presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) winning more votes than any in Taiwan’s history. The KMT did pick up three legislative seats, but the DPP retained an outright majority. To take responsibility for that catastrophic loss, as is customary, party chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) resigned. This would mark the end of an era of how the party operated and the beginning of a new effort at reform, first under