Hitch-hiking across the continent with mad poets: On the Road and Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac in Merchant Marine cap, 1944
Originally uploaded by pitoucat

Jean-Louis "Jack" Kerouac (1922 – 1969) was an American novelist and poet, says Wikipedia.

He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation.[2]

Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. Kerouac became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement.

In 1969, at age 47, Kerouac died from internal bleeding due to long-standing abuse of alcohol. Today the beat travelogue On The Road continues to sell 100,000 copies a year in the U.S. and Canada alone.

Legend has it that Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks, typing it almost nonstop on a 120-foot roll of paper. The truth is that the book actually had a much longer, bumpier journey from inspiration to publication, complete with multiple rewrites and repeated rejections.

Kerouac chronicled parts of his own experience with Buddhism, as well as some of his adventures with Gary Snyder and other San Francisco-area poets, in The Dharma Bums, set in California and Washington and published in 1958.

“the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road