On The Road
Described as everything from a "last gasp" of romantic fiction to a founding text of the Beat Generation movement, this story amounts to a nonfiction novel (as critics were later to describe some works). Unpublished writer buddies wander from coast to coast in search of whatever they find, eager for experience. Kerouac's spokesman is Sal Paradise (himself) and real-life friend Neal Casady appears as Dean Moriarty.
Stats for nerds
23recommend
69mentions
66people
2007–2026years
35% recommend58% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I've been re-reading Kerouac lately (LOA has a nice collection of novels in a single volume). His prose is jumps from bebop riffs (On the Road) to elegiac praise of hiking in the woods/mountains (Dharma Bums). The characters (like them or not) are well drawn and always interesting. My hitchhiking days are long gone and I don't suppose this mode of transportation obtains much in the US anymore, which I think is unfortunate as it is (or was) a great way to see the country and meet a lot of people.
- which type of fame? ephemeral best-sellers by New York Times?
because if you 'read' hundreds of books each year and you can't see sui generis in works like Don Quijote, Cien años de soledad, Fernando Pessoa, Ferreira de Castro, Raduan Nassar or getting down to english solely, Ulysses play on words or even biographies like Walden by Henry David Thoreau or On The Road by Jack Kerouac or poems by Walt Whitman, Maya Angelou and even translated stuff like Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Hans Staden etc. ※ i'm curious the motif of your dismissal. specially when people dedicate their lives to study literature and in some way or another, rank up classics again and again... please also consider some books were revolutionary or set a genre on the time they were released, so it's unfair to want contemporaneity into stuff wrote 500 years ago, although some are quite impressive how actual they are by their age; as well personal preference. i never got hooked by Great Gatsby, for example (although i finished it)
- 1) Kerouac’s “On The Road” read by Sean Penn.
2) Comedian’s autobiography self-preformed (Martin Short, Guy Brannan, Trevor Noah and Jerry Seinfeld)
3) A Life in Parts, Bryan Cranston
Sometimes I listen to an audiobook for a few chapters to hear the author’s “voice” and then start the print version from the beginning. A writer for whom this isn’t necessary? Garrison Keillor whose distinctive voice I can hear at-will and who writes exactly as he speaks.
- Anything by Charles Bukowski, or the beatniks, whose names I can't recall at the moment.
Edit: ah, Jack Kerouac was at least one of them (although On the Road was already mentioned). Electric Kool Aid Acid Test is a wild ride, as well as pretty much anything by Hunter S. Thompson.
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- Thanks, I'll look them up. I have read Jack Kerouac, On the Road, great book. [Flashback 20:57 Sep 25, Jack Kerouac, (this means I just remembered the memory for the first time since the lobotomy 13 years ago, specific distinct sensation that happens the very first time I follow a pointer to that memory). Yeah that's me. Let me say here my words are poetry really, in prose format. Prosetry.
So for an explanation, the same thing happened to me that happened to August Rodin.
Too literal. His statues were too literal so he made sculptures to the point he was accused of literally putting molds against the subject's skin to shape it, which is easy. Nobody really buys this story. Everybody--even at Stanford, which has Rodin statues everywhere, in the places of most honor, largest collection of Rodin statues outside Paris, talk about Rodin a lot but--disbelieves the story.
Let me vindicate him now. I had too literally perfect an American English, and that meant everybody assumed I understood how the system worked, when I also assumed I understood how the system worked--different system. So in Chile it's like an egg, there's a shell, as long as the shell hasn't been cracked they respect you, honor contracts, you're set. Chile would have given me a trial in my lynching no matter what. Literally no matter what. In fact I was counting on a trial no matter how kangaroo--kangaroo court would have still been court, plenty good for me, in Chile the courts aren't kangaroo so much as intensely Kafkaesque, but with loopholes for literally one in a million to be spared. I in fact did that, 200000 Chilean students finished high school 2007, I got the best college results by Hacker News standards and in hindsight also. Counted on being the Harvard black of Chile, one slot for the country, got it. Nobody can believe it. Dude no American no matter how racist bigoted like WASP dude Mayflower nothing sees me as anything other than American. That is not where the discrimination is coming from.
That was a problem, I couldn't communicate to the administration my copious copious copious evidence or talk to witnesses, nothing. Well it was a lynching, might as well have been speaking Chinese.
