Episode 16: On the Road
A weeks-long, boozed soaked, Benzedrine crazed, smoked-filled literary journey across the United States, (no, we're not describing a typical Tuesday for Brian), Jack Kerouac's seminal Beat Generation novel, On the Road, was published on September 5, 1957 and changed the way people wrote and lived...and may have helped usher in the Hippie Movement of the 60's. Jack Kerouac wrote in a new, exciting way he called spontaneous prose (some say our podcast uses a similar haphazard style, but with lesser results), and detailed his travels across late 1940's American landscape with his friend and muse, Neal Cassady (known as Dean Moriarty in the novel). The novel has been hailed as the harbinger of the Beat Generation, and dismissed by many as naïve, and in the words of Truman Capote, typing not writing. Listen as Brian and Rodrigo debate the merits of this novel, and try not to gratuitously swear (we're cleaning it up, folks!). Was On the Road the Hippie handbook? Was it writing or typing? Listen and decide!
