A jazz journey through the remarkable life of American novelist, poet, boddhisattva and bebop saint Jack Kerouac in 158 placemarksThis 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 Kerouacs 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 dont 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 Jacks patriotic conservatism, and when Neal Cassady, the mad Ahab at the wheel whod 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 elses. We begin our travels in
Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouacs hometown, and the place where his storied road ultimately returned.
FURTHER READINGThe official homepage:http://www.jackkerouac.comA host of characters and info, and the fight over the estate:http://www.tijean.freeserve.co.ukA loving, living, educational shrine on wheels:http://www.beatmuseum.org/kerouac/jackkerouac.htmlA 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.comGreat 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.htmlFEB 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.
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