Posted on by Phil Strawn

Exploring the Beat Generation: Kerouac and Cassidy’s Road Trip


Jack Kerouac

Two Catholic boys, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy, are on a road trip by car across the American West to find the meaning of life. The badlands of New Mexico held all the secrets that New York City would never have. It could be a great book are a movie. But, as it turns out, it was a book first. What could go wrong?

It was 1947, and half the country still lived in a Norman Rockwell painting, and the other poor souls struggled with keeping food on their table and a decent job. The war was a few years ago, and the scars were fresh and raw. As the movies would have you believe, not everyone had the good fortune to live in New York City and shop at Macy’s. The Hollywood boys covered everything in Fairy Dust and Unicorn Piss, and the commies were coming to your neighborhood. The two young men sensed the growing change and needed to find the “real America,” the wide-open, gritty, in-your-face, working man culture that made their country run on regular gasoline.

“On The Road” was published in 1951. The author, Jack Kerouac, a French Canadian American who didn’t learn to speak or write in English until he was six years old, became an instant literary celebrity and a reluctant prophet to the “Beats,” which would become the “Hippies” in the 1960s. He tolerated the Beats and the new intellectuals because he helped birth them, but grew to despise the Hippies before he died. He wrote many times that he was sorry they found his books and used them as their warped ideological, drug-addled bible that led to the near destruction of his beloved country. The “beat generation,” another term he loathed, wasn’t meant to survive past 1960. The writings and musings made no sense after 1959. He believed everything had an expiration date.

Ginsburg and Burroughs kept the plates spinning; the publishing cash and the adulation were too strong to walk away. So Kerouac moved on and became a drunkard and pillhead. Fame, and all that came attached, was not his bag.

The only comparison to the book that I can think of would be the “road” movies of the 1940s. Two pals and a gal road-tripping to Nirvana. Kerouac would have been Bing Crosby and Cassidy a bi-polar Bob Hope with his girlfriend a sluttish Dorothy Lamour. But, of course, their adventure was adults only. Weed, booze, Minga Minga, and foul language would not have made it with old Bing and Bob.

The two main characters, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, were the essential bad boys before it was cool. Their names alone were enough to make you buy the book. Every teenager who read it could easily place themselves in their universe for a while. Who knows how many ill-fated trips the book influenced?

My cousin and I toyed with the idea. First, to California and back to New York, then home to Texas in his Corvair; then the effects of the pot wore off, we ate a cheeseburger and shit-canned the plan.

James Dean was a disciple, as was Marlon Brando. They wore bad boy cool like a soft leather jacket. The movie boys jumped on it. “Rebel Without A Cause” and “The Wild Ones” sent parents screaming through their middle-class neighborhoods with hair ablaze. Ozzie and Harriet doubled down. Pat Boone turned up the heat. Art Linkletter had a meltdown. The fifties were dying before our eyes.

I may revisit “On The Road” again. It sits on my bookshelf, aging like wine, and needs to be jostled.

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14 Replies to “Exploring the Beat Generation: Kerouac and Cassidy’s Road Trip”

  1. My often less than coherent ramblings have more than a few times been compared to Jack’s. I was late to seriously read the entirety of his works, and ever since have taken the comparison as an affront. Roald Dahl, okay, but not Kerouac and not James Joyce.

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  2. A great read, Phil. Hubs and I chuckled all the way through it as I read it aloud. Thanks for the smiles and the memories.

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    1. Jack had a very closed and detached body language during Allen’s interview-but he recited his prose quite well. And he said he wrote the book in three weeks! Thanks for sharing this, Nancy. 🙂

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  4. I never read Kerouac’s book. That was a time when you could actually hitchhike cross country without a car. The roads weren’t crammed with drivers raging and smashing your windshield with baseball bats. It would not be such a “fun” adventure in today’s traffic with so many aggressive and careless drivers who might find it annoying to run over a hitchhiker.

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  5. Well this is a change – a book/movie review! More movie descendants – “Easy Rider” and “Into the Wild.” A rather pallid book descendant (though marvelous in its way) “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Oh, and Tom Wolfe’s tale of Ken Kesey “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Of course, all these road trips are really traceable back to Huck Finn.

    I had not known about Kerouac’s subsequent disgust with how his book had been adopted by the Beat/Hippie crowd. Thanks for this insight.

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    2. I’m a fan of Jack’s, Wolfe, Twain, all of them, and I’ve read them all. Great American authors that shaped the literary landscape of this country. My affinity lies with Steinbeck, Capote, Lee, Roth and a few others. They are the ones that grabbed my soul and have yet to release it. I will give a hard nod to Amor Towles, who may be the torch bearer into the future.

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  7. Gotta say, some of those later interview videos with Kerouac, after he’d descended into disgruntled alcoholism, were kinda sad. He was a great inspiration, including to those damned hippies my grandma used to complain about. Being influenced by both the Beats and the hippies myself, I can see the countercultural continuity but also the contrast. I picture the Beats, street smart, maybe wearing black leather jackets in smoky coffee shops in North Beach, vs hippies, naïve idealists in colorful bellbottoms, dancing high in Golden Gate Park with an air of deliberate irresponsibility. Bob Dylan to me is pure Beat, despite his equally large impact on the hippies – can’t see him dancing in Golden Gate Park, but can see him at the edge of the park, smirking at the flower-clad waifs, hahaha. Love’m all, though. And I made that trip for you – hitchhiked Austin to California to Chicago, NYC, Florida … Not to mention 18 countries hitchhiked in the past 7 years.

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    1. Yep, like you, I was one of those long-haired rock musicians, but with more of a conservative bone. Kerouac and a few of his counterparts were brilliant until the alcohol pickled their senses and robbed them of their talent. I loved his work, but loved Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Wolfe even more. Dylan was a pure beat kind of guy and found the hippies a bit pretentious, as he has stated in his senior years. Thank you for the in-depth reply. Please keep in touch.

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      1. Which reminds me of another thing. Despite that countercultural continuity, the aesthetic contours of the Beat world view were shaped by the writers, but the aesthetic contours of the hippie world view were shaped by a new breed of musical artists — Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Janis, Neil Young, the Beatles …

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