Jack Kerouac did much to inspire and popularize a concept he called “Beat” which came to encompass the works of several writers, mostly from New York, before spreading to the West Coast, and eventually going international during its prime in the mid fifties to early sixties. It can be seen as the most vibrant bohemian movement until the “hippies” emerged in its immediate wake like a direct result. Indeed, Kerouac's brother-idol Neal Cassady went on to drive the bus for Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters during their mind-expanding Acid Tests. Kerouac’s friendship with Cassady and his wife was made into a film starring Nick Nolte and Sissy Spacek called HeartBeat (which was panned in Charles Bukowski’s Hollywood for having such a cornball title).
Denverhometown hero Neal Cassady, known locally as a car thief and womanizer and to fans of Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, was Jack Kerouac’s perfected hipster archetype before and after applying a similar hero-worshipping dynamic to Gary Snyder. One of the first times I went downtown as a teenager, a friend and I retraced Neal’s route from the Larimer Street flophouse where he lived with his father, Neal Sr. to his grammar school, Ebert Elementary, which still exists. The young Neal also served as an altar boy at Holy Ghost Catholic Church and went to East High School as a teen.
In On The Road, The Original Scroll, the occasional typos or misspellings (“jaloppy”) do nothing to hinder the narrative’s smooth, fast flow. After a series of introductions and commentaries by its editors and commentators, the entire manuscript is presented as a single uneindented paragraph hundreds of pages long. There are no pseudonyms used, and more time is spent on details reduced to the superficial or incidentl in the version first published. For example, more time is spent on the Beats’ Denver connection through Justin W. Brierly, a lawyer on the Denver schoolboard nicknamed “Dancingmaster Death” by the young Ginsberg, who introduced Neal to the Columbia gang, and went on to dedicate some stained glass windows at the Tears McFarlane House before disappearing from the evident record. Let all who care to enter this account of a exciting, adventurous, seemingly unending travel trip journey back and forth across America to culminate, as did the first printed version, in joyous Mexico “where Kerouac went!”
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