GINSBERG: I think he was interested in the flow of consciousness and the flow of feeling, and the accuracy of instant-by-instant recording of what was flashing through his mind. In 1985 at his Lower East Side apartment, Ginsberg told me when he met Kerouac in the 1940s, Kerouac was already experimenting, like a jazz musician, with spontaneous improvisation. VITALE: The late poet Allen Ginsberg says that his writing style was simply an extension of Kerouac's. ALLEN GINSBERG (Poet): When I went to Kerouac's house once, and I'd been revising my poem, and he said, stop revising. And they were all urging that tenorman to hold it and keep it with cries and wild eyes. And Dean was clutching his head in the crowd and it was a mad crowd. KEROUAC: Uproars of music and the tenorman had it. But the enduring aspect of 'On The Road' is not its literary history but the music of its prose. The hero of the novel, Dean Moriarty, is based on their friend Neal Cassady, an ex-convict and a Casanova of astonishing energy.

VITALE: In 'On The Road', Kerouac mythologizes his friends, a circle of hipsters he called The Beats, including the poet Allen Ginsberg and the writer William Burroughs. And far from escorting the girls into the place, Dean Moriarty was already racing across the street with his huge bandit's thumb in the air yelling, blow, man, blow. JACK KEROUAC (Author, 'On The Road'): Out we jumped in the warm, mad night, hearing a wild tenorman's bawling horns across the way going, ee-yah(ph), ee-ya, and hands clapping to the beat and folks yelling go, go, go. (Soundbite of recording, 'Reads On The Road') TOM VITALE: Four months after 'On The Road' was published, Jack Kerouac recorded a modified excerpt from the novel, a scene set in a San Francisco jazz club in the summer of 1949.

Its author was hailed as the voice of the Beat Generation.įrom New York, Tom Vitale prepared this report.

It's a tale of a circle of friends who crisscrossed America, bucked conformity as they thirst for experience. Jack Kerouac's 'On The Road,' published September 5th, 1957. Fifty years ago this week, a novel appeared that was a precursor of the counterculture of the 1960s and has captured the imaginations of readers since.

Jack kerouac on the road 1957