A jazz journey through the remarkable life of American novelist, poet, boddhisattva and bebop saint Jack Kerouac in 158 placemarks

This post was graphically enhanced in November 2007.

With the interminably on-again-off-again movie version of “On the Road” still waiting to start production though at least tentatively slated for release in 2009 – Walter Salles of “The Motorcycle Diaries” to direct – Google Earth is still the best place to get a feel for what really went into Jack Kerouac’s best-known novel.

Before the hip-hop and the grunge and the hippies and the yippies and the mods and the rockers, there were the beats (and don’t call them beatniks). Jack Kerouac was abruptly anointed “the King of the Beats” when three of his novels came out within a single year, and one of them, "On the Road", eclipsed all the other prose and poems that he and his young buddies produced in those halcyon late ’50s. It was a crown he disliked because it invited press and parody, as well as jealousy, and he liked it even less when the hippies arrived in the ’60s and regarded him as an icon. Their anti-war protests and disdain for the establishment had nothing in common with Jack’s patriotic conservatism, and when Neal Cassady, the “mad Ahab at the wheel” who’d chauffeured his wanderings and been immortalised in “On the Road”, drove Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters to New York to meet him in 1964 and someone draped the American flag over his shoulders, Kerouac quietly took it off, folded it neatly and laid it on the back of his chair.

“I read ‘On the Road’ in maybe 1959,” Bob Dylan said. “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.” We begin our travels in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac’s hometown, and the place where his storied road ultimately returned.

FURTHER READING

The official homepage:
http://www.jackkerouac.com

A host of characters and info, and the fight over the estate:
http://www.tijean.freeserve.co.uk

A loving, living, educational shrine on wheels:
http://www.beatmuseum.org/kerouac/jackkerouac.html

A beat tour of Denver:
http://www.denvergov.org/AboutDenver/today_driving_beat_stop1.asp

The 2002 C-Span programme on Kerouac:
http://www.americanwriters.org/classroom/videolesson/clips35_kerouac.asp#

Special thanks to the Cosmic Baseball Association for the detailed chronology:
http://www.cosmicbaseball.com

Great stuff on the Denver scene:
http://www.tomchristopher.com/?op=home/Beat%20Generation

Jack's medical record at SmokingGun.com:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0906052_jack_kerouac_1.html

FEB 2008 EDIT: Position of Bixby Canyon in Placemark 127 has been corrected. Thanks to muttdog and Hill.
MAY 2008 EDIT: Ralph White has pointed out that Marker 83 was well wide of the mark of 124th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, so that's been shifted.