50 Years on, Kerouac's 'On The Road' Reveals the Beatnik as a Tender, Geeky Romantic

This September marks the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's seminal On the Road. It also is the half centennial of Norman Mailer's ode to the white negro and the obscenity trial of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl." 1957 was a big year for the newly named Beat Generation. Over the previous five years, movies like Rebel Without a Cause and alarmist news stories about youth culture had made the "juvenile delinquent" an increasingly sensational figure in pop culture. The press was eager to analyze (and dramatize) what this post-war ethos was all about, so when Kerouac's book came out, many looked to it as the proclamation its original title, The Beat Generation, claimed it to be.

"Whatever else it is, and whether good or bad, this is pretty sure to be the most "remarkable" novel of 1957," wrote poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth in the San Francisco Chronicle. The New York Times rave reinforced Kerouac's spokesman role: "On the Road is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as "beat," and whose principal avatar he is."

Overnight and with unparalleled media intensity, Kerouac was propelled to fame. And not just as a writer but as an icon: "King of the Beats." It was a role that plagued him to his death and has only strengthened in the nearly 40 years since. Read his name today and it is mostly used as shorthand for hard drinking and fast driving, for New York nights and screw-it-all cool. Kerouac is now the image of him that adorns many of his books, leaning steely-eyed against a brick wall, cigarette in hand. I'd even written a book about a road trip in which I dismissively used him as a stand-in for all that is outdated, nostalgic and glorified about the image of road. To me, Kerouac represented the original hipster with all the wrecked, indulgent imagery such a title connotes.

In light of the book's anniversary, however, I recently revisited On the Road. I found I had him all wrong. The Kerouac as presented through his doppelganger, Sal Paradise, wasn't a petulant bad boy: He was an embattled romantic. This story of how he was miscast as an avatar of cool is a study of both media and his own success at self-promotion. Considering the way his name is so commonly invoked, the repercussions of this distortion are relevant today.

"I said to myself, Wow! What'll Denver be like! I got on that hot road, and off I went in a brand-new car driven by Denver businessmen. He went 70. I tinged all over; I counted minutes and subtracted miles. Just ahead, over the rolling wheatfields all golden beneath the distant snows of Estes, I'd be seeing old Denver at last. I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was "Wow!"

I'm hardly the first to call Kerouac a romantic. Many have connected the 1950s Beat artists with the 18th century post-Enlightenment Romantic Movement. They shared a disregard for tradition and reason, valued individual expressions over institutional ones and stressed emotion as an aesthetic experience. Kerouac's descriptions of jazz certainly mirror the Romantic's adulation of folk art and heightened emotional experience is the primal focus of On the Road's narrative.

But that's not the romantic I'm referring to. There is another commonly conjured image of the romantic in today's culture that looks less like Byron and Hawthorne than it does the character Charlotte in Sex and the City. These modern romantics are often distinguished for their optimism, for their belief in the possibility of a happily ever after. They are the male lead in a romantic comedy. The Bachelorettes vying for a rose. They do not seek refuge in irony or cynicism; their enthusiasms are unashamed. They are, in short, the antithesis of cool.