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."
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