Quotations and Literature Forum

On The Road, a great novel. Kerouac is probably, in my opinion, the most under appreciated great American author. I mean come on, High School students are required to read book by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the guy's writing reads like medieval alchemy text. God forbid we "expose" our nations youth to any literature which has any kind of drug or sexual references. Let's face it what children face in reality on a daily basis is much more intense than anything they could read in print.

Of course Truman Capote might differ. He said that what the Beat poets did wasn't writing but typing.

It may simply be a case of Kerouac being "too hard to teach." I was blessed when in 1966 I was introduced to his work by a young English teacher in my freshman year of high school. We compared Kerouac's style to Dostoevsky's!

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There are more horses' asses in the world than there are horses.

good for Truman Capote....maybe he was jealous or somethin...

Kerouac and Dostoevsky huh? Interesting, have to think about that.

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"It was as though the man had to shout in order to convince himself of his existence." - Gumbril - Antic Hay, A.L. Huxley

plus capote only said that b/c he heard kerouac didnt edit or revise his stuff....

I read the greater part of Kerouac's books when I was much younger. The one I still carry with me is Desolation Angels. I would read it again one day.

Past the lonely mills of Lowell
Winds the weary Merrimack.
In the dark streets echo still
The footsteps of Jack Kerouac.

Henry

Trust me I love Kerouac like I love my father, but I feel he was not a 1st-rate writer. On The Road is a masterpiece of sorts, but it is nothing that your average highschool student should read. I read the Dharma Bums my freshman year of college. It was what got me hooked on Kerouac. I have read On The Road about 7 times, and collect copies of it. But I accept that he was nothing special in the world of authors.

Kerouac's Opening Paragraph - 254 words

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserabley weary splitup and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I'd often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who'd shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform school. I was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about Nietzche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew. At one point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Dean was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou.
http://www.charm.net/~brooklyn/People/JackKerouac.html
http://www.litkicks.com/BeatPages/page. ... =OnTheRoad
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articl ... 89,00.html

Closing:

"Good-by, Dean," I said. "I sure wish I didn't have to go to the concert."
"D'you think I can ride to Fortieth Street with you?" he whispered. "Want to be with you as much as possible, m'boy, and besides it's so durned cold in this here New Yawk..." I whispered to Remi. No, he wouldn't have it, he liked me but he didn't like my idiot friends. I wasn't going to start all over again ruining his planned evenings as I had done at Alfred's in San Francisco in 1947 with Roland Major.
"Absolutely out of the question, Sal!" Poor Remi, he had a special necktie made for this evening; on it was painted a replica of the concert tickets, and the names Sal and Laura and Remi and Vicki, the girl, together with a series of sad jokes and some of his favorite sayings such as "You can't teach the old maestro a new tune."
So Dean couldn't ride uptown with us and the only thing I could do was sit in the back of the Cadillac and wave at him. The bookie at the wheel also wanted nothing to do with Dean. Dean, ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone, and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again. Poor little Laura, my baby, to whom I'd told everything about Dean, began almost to cry.
"Oh, we shouldn't let him go like this. What'll we do?"
Old Dean's gone, I thought, and out loud I said, "He'll be all right." And off we went to the sad and disinclined concert for which I had no stomach whatever and all the time I was thinking of Dean and how he got back on the train and rode over three thousand miles over that awful land and never knew why he had come anyway, except to see me.
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody else besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.
http://www.spress.de/beatland/reader/kerouac/prose3.htm
http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~mnorcia/sa02/ye ... talia.html
http://www-hsc.usc.edu/~gallaher/k_spea ... peaks.html

A bunch of quotes from "On The Road"
http://lorenwebster.net/In_a_Dark_Time/ ... 00117.html

Come on now...no other author in American literature has presented the post world war 2 youth of america in such a telling and intimate way. The novels themselves go beyond the word printed on the paper and as far as 50s period pieces On the Road is rivaled by few. Visions of Gerard portrayed an in depth childhood experience (lived by Kerouac, like many of the events depicted in his novels) Mechanics and grammar are not what makes a good author.

Irishmacalicious

For starters, you seem to make a correlation between quality and requirement. I believe we can both agree that "high school reading lists" and quality of product are nothing if not divergent. With that behind us, allow us to discuss the actual content of On the Road, which I read recently upon recommendation. I have absolutely nothing against discussion of drug use, of which you may consider me a fan, advocate, or expert depending on interpretation. However, I was sorely disappointed by what is considered one of the greatest works of the "Beat Generation". It read more like a "What I Did on Summer Vacation" with a few rare exceptions of truly entertaining pockets of entertainment. I suggest you read something along the lines of Faulkner, or peruse Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, or Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O'Toole. Unfortunately, I cannot think of the rest of the list of well qualified authors I have taken up in the near past, as I am writing this in a hurry under the influence of sweet, sweet Vodka, but I believe you will be more than satisfied by the aforementioned works. Good day sir (or madam), and may you live well in wisdom.

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I am practically computer illiterate. If you are reading this, I assure you it is completely by accident.

[quote="Mechanics and grammar are not what makes a good author.
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I read On The Road when last summer, I am sixteen. When I read the first pages I was like "wow," I have found the author of my life. However, after the first twenty pages I realized that he was a good author, his mechanics and grammar is great, but his ideology and philosophy is really stupid and pointless. Those guys wanted to live the moment, and they believe that the way to do so was getting high and getting prostitutes. That book did nothing but throw hundres oh kids "on the road" with no money, wasting their time and doing harm to society.

I read Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" and it is good, but it is the same thing as Kerouac. They may be good writers but they wasted their talent...

This is my opinion and I it is not my intention to disturbe anyone's opinions about these authors.

Joy

I think what made Kerouac so much more brilliant than those that came before wasn't the quality of his writing, but the percussive rhythm to it. Because he was such a compulsive and raving lunatic as he pounded out "On the Road" we were allowed a portal into his mind body and soul, if you listen closely to what he's saying on the journey you'll here a distinctive thump thump, thump thump as the pages flap flap flap away.

Yellowed with age, smudged with editing marks and the author's own ink-covered fingerprints, the scroll rolls over nearly 120 feet of paper. It is a relic of a literary phenomenon.

Kerouac wrote the novel in a coffee-saturated, 21-day typewriter marathon at a friend's apartment in New York City in 1951. When finally published six years later, it won critical acclaim as an unconventional masterpiece, defining a post-World War II generation of intellectual outlaws on an aimless odyssey across the American landscape.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TRAVEL/DESTINAT ... scroll.ap/

More thoughts here:
http://partners.nytimes.com/books/97/09 ... owing.html

I think the book defined a disaffected generation at that time. It, at the very least, has literary value for that reason.