Episode 37: On the Road

Once upon a time, Jack Kerouac got very drunk, taped a 120-foot roll of paper together, and started typing for three straight weeks. He ended up with On the Road (1957), in which Kerouac is “Sal Paradise,” his BFF Neal Cassady is “Dean Moriarty,” and which recounts their travels across the United States and Mexico -- full of cool musings on how wives are a drag, man, and how they call beer “cerveza” in Spanish. OK, we find plenty to dunk on in this famous Beat novel (e.g. misogyny, ambivalent-to-non-existent class politics or any politics for that matter, and racism/essentialism). But we also have a lot of great convo about the refusal of Cold War capitalist hegemony, homosociality and desire, the Beats, and how Kerouac is like a B minus minus minus Walt Whitman (sorry, we couldn’t resist). Also, Megan convinces Tristan and Katie that this is better if you read it as an eighteenth-century epistolary novel.

We read the Penguin edition with an introduction by Kerouac biographer Ann Charters. For more on the Beats and gender, we highly recommend Michael Davidson’s Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics. And Megan’s article “Caption, Snapshot, Archive: On Allen Ginsberg's Photo-Poems” in the March 2019 issue of Criticism is a pretty kick-ass discussion of the Beats and image culture if we do say so ourselves.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.