I've never been a huge fan of the beat generation either, though I've tried and tried. I've read them all at various stages of life - Ginsburg, Keroac and Burroughs. There's also an interesting memoir "Off the Road" by Caroline Cassady. From my reading the members of that group have all come across as a.- incredibly sexist and b.- addicts. Everything in between those two things seems to have been romanticized because of their immersion into the 60's-70's counterculture. I think their writing has become completely enmeshed in their legend - and because of that its' literary importance has been inflated. In fairness, I feel the same way about Bloomsbury.

But then I doubt I'm the target audience of On the Road.

The one exception I've come across is Anatole Broyard's memoir "Kafka was the Rage". It was incredibly funny, well-written, entertaining and feels authentic; without being self-indulgent. I recommend it highly!

So, don't feel bad for not being able to appreciate the beats... I think that's happened to more people than are willing to admit it!

Thank you for this! I have tried and failed to appreciate Kerouac for years. I don't know if it's because I feel so deeply rooted to my home or because I'm a woman, or some combination of both, but the life presented in On the Road seems sad and wearying.

Different strokes, I guess. I respect your opinion, but... Growing up in the fifties, On the Road for me was about exuberance and escape, not about finding personal fulfillment. Maybe it doesn't translate to a different century.

Kerouac's much-maligned writing style was equally exuberant and ground-breaking to me. Later, Tom Wolfe would adopt and expand that style in Electric Kool-Aid.

Also, let's separate the man from the writing. Kerouac the man was somewhat pathetic, and it's not surprising that you find little kinship with him. Kerouac the writer was for some of us a jolt of energy.

Oh Joe - it's actually Kerouac the man I like better (struggling to get out of Lowell, make it as a writer and then accept the insane fame On the Road brought) then Kerouac the writer. And the combination of Kerouac and Cassady is just kind of hard to take. The "personal fulfillment" bit I got from writers writing about On the Road - which interests me more than anything else...not so much what Kerouac was trying to do with the book but what others got out of it which I think was way beyond what he ever thought or planned.

There are moments in OTR that I thought were beautifully written (and I mean that) but I kept coming back to the fact that the book is about people spiraling out of control and they never got better. In the end Dean leaves Sal (whose violently ill) in Mexico and Sal eventually returns to the US no closer to being able to save himself then he was at the beginning. He just clings to the idea of Dean even though the reality of Dean has never helped him. I guess to me Dean (and thus Neal) only brought bad energy into Sal's (and thus Jack's) life. I have to wonder if things would have ended so sorrowfully for Kerouac if he had lived his life without these friendships - he would have been a different kind of writer but maybe one who lived.

you have gone where I have not, dear Colleen, and lived to tell the tale.

I like Kerouac for the same reason that I like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. Kerouac and Thompson epitomize angst...adult angst....the kind driven by demons you want to leave behind but can't. Most of us don't always feel like immersing ourselves in angst. But those of us who've continued to suffer it long out of our teens, throughout our twenties, and into our thirties--God, it sucks--I think that's why we find Kerouac and Thompson compelling.

There was a copy of On The Road in my middle school library. After reading it, I deaccessioned it. I didn't get it, either. Too irresponsible.

As a once young man wanting to "chuck it all", this book spoke to me in various ways. Now, it would be harder for me to understand it, as a non-disaffected slightly older man.

So maybe it really has to be read between the ages of, say, 16 and 25? Maybe it only works for who you are then. I did sort of chuck it all and move to AK at 23 but still...there was a job and a boy on the other end and I stayed there 10 years so not really Kerouac-like. My father went into the military like Kerouac but he stayed and then moved into Civil Service. So his was a very responsible escape from RI, so to speak.

I feel like I need to channel Jess from The Gilmore Girls. I think he would totally get Jack.

Nah, I read On the Road in my twenties, and thought it was stupid. Or, more correctly, I thought the Dean guy was stupid, arrogant and boring. I was much more interested in Sal, but Sal is so enraptured with Dean's coolness that he tells us nothing about his own adventures.

Is Kerouac a "guy's guy?" Dunno. But certainly he's not for me.

I read OTR summer before my sophomore year in high school. I was on a train from Chicago to California and moving through that space and time coupled with the promise of getting my driver's license the following summer, the book blew my mind.

I think it was the promise of adventure and escape, options that were closed to me at the time that drew me in.

I tried to read other Kerouac in college and after. It didn't work. I still enjoy a lot of the Beat poetry, but not the prose.

I think you have to take Kerouac in context. He was of my parents' generation and they grew up in a different time, when French Canadian families like ours were very repressed. (My great-grand-parents came to Lowell from Quebec in the 1880s, and my grandparents were born in the 1890s; thus my parents were both born in 1923, which I think is the same year as Kerouac.) I'm not a Kerouac scholar by any means, and while I loved Kerouac's work in high school, he really depresses me now.