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  • Hacker News
  • Jack Kerouac was quite misogynistic in real life and this unfortunately comes through in his work. Makes it hard to read.
    by cm2012
  • Misogyny in the past and in the recent current haven’t been moral failings.
    by dyauspitr
  • Many great authors are deeply flawed people. Tolstoy was not a good person, and Steinbeck was a complete a-hole. The list is long. But the classics they create are no less classic.

    https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/fea...

    https://www.rbth.com/history/330411-why-leo-tolstoy-was-terr...

    by kerabatsos
  • On the road was terrible writing, Kerouac a misogynistic drunk - I believe the reason it became that popular was that it captured Americana at a time when some freethinkers realized their parents' ways were too stifling
    by sharadov
  • Tsk, tsk: the author of this piece fails to mention the long-lost--but recently found--Joan Anderson letter, written by Neal Casady. Kerouac himself attributed Casady's style in the letter to helping him find a style appropriate to Road. Kerouac considered the letter to be a literary masterpiece in its own right and arranged to have Ginsberg, then affiliated with Ace paperbacks, to submit it for publication. Ginsberg sent the only copy to a friend in San Francisco to be submitted to a little press in San Francisco and then invented a story about the letter--at this point legally a manuscript?--being lost overboard off a houseboat. The little press went out of business. Ginsberg’s lie probably discouraged any effort to find the letter. When the little press went out of business, the landlord dumped its office’s contents left behind in the building’s lobby. An accountant working in the building went through this garbage and carried some of it home, where it found a place in his attic.

    Fast forward forty years. The accountant dies. His daughter comes to clean out her father’s house. She asks a friend to help. They find a box and an envelope: Casady’s Joan Anderson letter.

    The Kerouac Estate is quite a legal mess. A Florida court found that a purported will was fraudulent, but I'll leave that issue aside because the Estate has been a good steward of Kerouac's writing--unlike the Joyce Estate.

    Complicated rules attach to letters. A physical letter is the property of the recipient, but IP rights remain in its author, as J.D. Salinger found out when his letters went up for auction. Salinger was saved by Peter Norton--you may have heard of his "Utilities" who bought the letters and gave them to Salinger. Casady's heirs have a claim. Other rules apply to manuscripts. This one was thrown in the trash and California has rules that vest ownership in anyone who finds treasure in someone else’s disposed-of trash, such as the accountant. A Sotheby’s auction was halted at the last minute. A settlement was reached among the parties and the letter now is archived at Emory University.

    by pseingatl
  • Slate Star Codex's review is always worth a re-read

    https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-roa...

    by lucraft
  • Harsh, but not, in my recollection, wrong.
    by cafard
  • Once I found out the beats were mostly gay it changed how I viewed them much as I didn’t want it to change how I viewed them. I even read all of William Burroughs and thought he was the only in the group but he wasn’t.
    by dyauspitr
  • Just a couple of bros, traveling the countryside in each other's company. History is full of such roommates.

    Just the other day we were thinking about how recent generations have gotten more conservative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734620

    The author proposes that it may reflect the incredible stability we've enjoyed in recent decades, which rewards more conservative "life planning":

    > Our super-safe environments may fundamentally shift our psychology. When you’re born into a land of milk and honey, it makes sense to adopt what ecologists refer to as a “slow life history strategy”—instead of driving drunk and having unprotected sex, you go to Pilates and worry about your 401(k). People who are playing life on slow mode care a lot more about whether their lives end, and they care a lot more about whether their lives get ruined. Everything’s gotta last: your joints, your skin, and most importantly, your reputation. That makes it way less enticing to screw around, lest you screw up the rest of your time on Earth.

    by hyrix
  • I read On the Road, and I think the most annoying thing about that book was how they had an enormous focus around funding their road trip and all the things they had to do to get money. Maybe that was all the plot they had, but it just felt weird.
    by narrator
  • I went down an epic rabbit hole the other day—a rabbit labyrinth really—learning about what happened to the children of the Beats. It started here:

    https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/10/24/the-female-pi...

    That's an intro to a novel by Jan Kerouac—Jack's daughter—which is newly reprinted. It (the intro) is well written and her (Kerouac's daughter's) story is incredible.

    That led me to this classic piece, "Children of the Beats", written in 1995 by the son of one of Kerouac's lovers:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20220408162741/https://www.nytim...

    He tracked down and interviewed several of his literary 'cousins': other children of Beat writers and scenesters. If, like me, you are fascinated by how the lives of artists intertwine with family dynamics, that article is unputdownable. And profoundly sad. All of this material is tragic.

    Through that I started reading about Lucien Carr, the golden boy of the Beats who had been their lead shaman—a few years before Neal Cassady showed up—until he stabbed a man to death under murky circumstances that a Hacker News comment is too short to get into:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Carr

    That led me to reading about the children of Lucien Carr, one of whom—Caleb Carr—was a military historian who later became an accidental celebrity by writing "The Alienist", a 90s classic of the historical-serial-killer genre. Caleb Carr became an excellent writer, though as far from a Beat as a writer could be. He talks about the trauma field that he and his peers grew up in with painful eloquence.

    https://www.salon.com/1997/10/04/cov_si_04carr/

    He said this about his father and his buddies Ginsberg and Burroughs: "The one thing that their lifestyle did not factor in was family." To hear about that milieu from a child who had to deal with it all, decades later, is to me a entirely compelling thing.

    He used the money from his bestsellers to buy a small mountain in rural New York and built himself an 18th century manor house refuge:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20150529181658/https://www.nytim...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCrt8Pir7jA

    He died last year a month after his last book came out. His publishers thought they were getting another serial killer bestseller. Instead he delivered a memoir about his cat, whom this interviewer pushes him to agree was the love of his life:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zqGaXl1Zg0#t=173

    His mother left Lucien Carr and married a man who had three daughters, who grew up with Lucien's three sons in what Caleb (middle son) called a "dark Brady Bunch".

    Lucien lived for 11 years with Alene Lee, another former lover of Kerouac, and her daughter. A few years ago a blogger who is into Beat history did this interview with her (the daughter), which of all these pieces is probably the saddest, and which again I couldn't stop reading. If you can read this without your heart feeling assaulted, you're more resilient than I am:

    https://lastbohemians.blogspot.com/2022/04/christina-mitchel...

    The last rabbit-subhole I went down was the story of the son of William Burroughs, also named William Burroughs, who also wrote drug-phantasmagoric novels (one called "Speed"), had a liver transplant before he was 30, and died at the side of a road in Florida:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs_Jr.

    I was never attracted to the Beats aesthetically, except for Burroughs in a cobra-hypnotized way. But the mythology of the Beats as Bohemian free spirits has carried a lot of sway. There's a principle that the shadow side of the artist works itself out in the family. If you ever wanted to learn how this works, the Beat constellation is quite the case to study.

    Here is what the son of Neal Cassady, the icon of beatific spontaneity, said in the 1995 interview I linked to above:

    "By the 60's, Dad was so burned out, so bitter," John Allen says. "He told me once that he felt like a dancing bear, that he was just performing. He was wired all the time, talking nonstop. I remember once, after a party, about 2 A.M., he went in the bathroom, turned on the shower and just started screaming and didn't stop. I was about 15 then and I knew he was in deep trouble, that he was really a tortured soul. He died not too long after that."

    by dang
  • As a youngster I was really into Burroughs. He was presented to me by older people as great writer, a cool artistic sort of person like Andy Warhol or Jackson Pollok, but in the literary sphere. When you’re young you don’t have life experience yet, so if someone gets enough critical praise, you think they must be great. Boy is it hard growing up and realizing that not only does the emperor have no clothes, but the people you idolize are morally, intellectually and artistically bankrupt. I still really adore some of Ginsburg’s poems, there are some real gems in the dross. But Ginsburg was a legit pedo. Kerouac was an overrated drunkard. Burroughs killed his wife and seemed to have little to no remorse, arguably he was a sociopath. As you note, as a group they were horrible people, abusive parents, drunkards, pedophiles, junkies, but for me the most difficult realization was that they were artistic frauds and really not very talented, and even worse, that everything presented to me by authority figures about aesthetics and culture was complete bullshit. But that is the best sort of liberation, and the beats would approve of liberation from the baggage of the past so it sort of goes full circle.
    by notmyjob
  • It goes to show that for how much we mythologize the lifestyles of 20th century writers, their lives weren’t necessarily healthy ones.
    by tinkelenberg
  • About fifty years ago, The Denver Post ran a series of articles about people who had known Cassady, Kerouac, and other beats in their Denver days. I remember about two things about the articles, one being that those still around to be interviewed had given up drinking.
    by cafard
  • Thanks for those great recommendations!

    You might be interested to hear that Carolyn Cassadi, Neal Cassadys wife at the time, wrote a book about her life with Neal and Jack. Not only did their lifestyle not consider family, they where in a complicated love triangle that neither of them was prepared for. A real challenge for Kerouac with his catholic upbringing. She also writes about how Kerouac very intentionally left some of his short comings out of his books. As Bukowski reportedly said: "I'm the hero of my own shit." I guess Bukowski was more honest about his editorializing.

    Either way, the book is called "Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg" [0] and is well worth the read. It might disnechant the beat authors for some, but at the same time it humanizes them.

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_the_Road

    Edit:

    The interview with Alene Lee daughter is very moving. Reminds me of a story, maybe it's in On the Road?, how Kerouac meets a guy in a Jazz Club and he invites him over to his place to drink some more beer. They wake up his wife by being loud, but she doesn't complain and Kerouac goes on about how she's such a good wife. Lot's of moments in the books like that if you're looking for them.

    It's very interesting for me to look back on how I didn't really register those passages when I was reading Kerouac in my teens, being swept away by the radical and breathless enthusiasm of his writing. I probably was a huge shit head back then myself.. :D

    by cheshire_cat
  • Personal anecdote time, which enough time has passed that it can finally be told.

    About 30 years ago, a family came down from the mountains near San Luis Obispo to ask whether my mother could teach them piano. They were an unusual family -- a mother and a number of children; apparently their father wouldn't leave his homestead up in the mountains. The children were all homeschoooled. They were perhaps a bit raggedy, but all quite brilliant and free-thinking, and quickly became excellent piano players. Our family became friends with theirs, and eventually we were invited to visit their homestead up in the mountains.

    The homestead was an off-grid hand-built house and working organic dairy farm, lovingly stuffed to the rafters with various arts and crafts, including a large collection of medieval-style musical instruments which the patriarch of the family, Hal, had built by hand. Hal was an enigma within an enigma: he refused to talk about his past, looked like a Santa-clause mountain man, wouldn't engage with the outside world in person, but was relentlessly curious about it -- able to keep up with conversations about the latest in politics and technology. He also had a keen interest in the archaeology of the upper Colorado plateau, and soon we were making trips to the Cal Poly library to check out the latest archaeology books on his behalf. One day, on a whim, we looked for his name in the index of one of those books, and that's when we found out that we already knew who he was.

    Haldon Chase[1] had been at the absolute epicenter of the Beat movement. He was the one who introduced Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac, and most of the other Beats to each other. He'd gone by pseudonym "Chad King" in "On the Road". At the time he didn't have a Wikipedia entry, and at the time all anybody knew is that he had vanished at some point. Of course my family felt privileged to know the rest of the story.

    Thinking now about Hal's life, in the few retrospectives I've seen of it, he's framed as having rejected the whole Beat lifestyle. I'm not sure that's accurate. In many ways the life he managed to carve out for himself was the apotheosis of much of the beat philosophy: genuinely free-thinking, self-reliant, non-conformist, creative, and in his way, spiritual. All very Beat. What he certainly rejected was the the limelight. The publicity, the drama, the ego. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with any of that. So he managed to get away and just live a good (if unconventional) life. His kids have all gone on to live really good, non-messed-up lives as well.

    So when reading stories about messed-up Beats and their messed-up kids, it's worth considering that there's a kind of anti-survivor-bias at play: where everything worked out, where the trauma didn't explode dramatically or get passed down the generations, you're probably not going to hear about it.

    1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldon_Chase -- mostly but not entirely accurate.

    by nkoren
  • Good book. I never laughed louder or smiled wider than the part where he becomes a Mexican cotton picker.
    by johnnienaked
  • I have long adored Kerouac and devoured everything he wrote as well as all the biographies about him. Thanks for posting this article, it was a pure delight to get some insight into the seldom covered battle to publish the book.
    by rmason
  • It is a good thing that on the road exists, it tells a vivid truth about america that many millions have experienced but very few put down in words My grandmother left NYC in 1929 with 3 other recently graduated nurses and drove a model A ford to california when there were still patches of prairy that had to be driven over, and in the 90's I drove there useing mostly back roads, bought a school bus in Vancouver for $50, and drove it back to Nova Scotia, though ended up chatting with Keasy at the country fair....got invited to the farm, but was in a hurry going south got a copy of on the road in a cleminites box, with a stack of state maps from the time it was written that I found all perfectly preserved in the rafters of my shop
    by metalman
  • > it tells a vivid truth about america that many millions have experienced but very few put down in words

    The similarly-titled "The Road" by Jack London does the same for an earlier America. It's one of my favorite books.

    by acuozzo
  • I gather that the pre-freeway 1940s and 1950s were the great age for road trips in America -- for all kinds of people, including the very non-bohemian.

    I read somewhere that the mathematician John von Neumann drove across the country over twenty times in the late 40s and early 50s -- between Princeton and Los Alamos, I would guess. I also read that in the late 40s some of Norbert Wiener's grad students drove from Boston to Mexico City for a cybernetics conference --- they were gone for months!

    Earlier, in the 1930s, there was the migration of Oakies from the dust bowl to California, as described in The Grapes of Wrath, which, come to think of it, is another road novel.

    In 1957 my family, a young couple with two little kids, moved from Wisconsin to Seattle, driving in our Plymouth station wagon, camping along the way. I was very young but I recall stopping for a flash flood, and another time we had to stop for a cattle drive that was crossing the highway, driven by actual cowboys on horseback! I remember it as one of the great adventures of my life.

    by jonjacky
  • On The Road was an inspiration to me in high school. I ended up doing a solo road trip around the west coast when I was 17. Met some interesting people. Mostly it was quiet. Not nearly the excitement I had hoped from the open road.

    I’m not sure if it was his writing as much as the idea of him that I was infatuated with. Anyway, thanks Kerouac.

    by WD-42
  • Blue Highways was much better, IMO.
    by dmd
  • Exactly the same. I loved Dharma Bums much more as a book, but On the Road certainly changed the course of my life. I'd always been made to wander, but never fully understood it.
    by tims33
  • I read it at 14 and it hit home with me right away. But then I recommended it to my then friend and she didn't get it. She said "nothing happened in it". And I can see her point now there was no plot, just wandering.

    To me, there were "scenes" I could imagine myself having liked to be part of, like the guys traveling on truck-bed drinking whisky to keep cold away. I wonder if it was more a "guy's novel" than for girls?

    by galaxyLogic