Its always hard for me to realize how early On the Road was written. Although it became a real hit in the 60s, it was obviously mostly written in very early 50s (about times in the late 40s!).
I read it when I was a freshman in college and the wild spirit appealed to me, but like lots of that kind of writing (ie. Bukowski), I'm not sure how appealing I would find it now.
Its certainly easy to see though why it was so influential. There is an interesting sort of undercurrent that connects Kerouac - Burroughs - Dylan together.
In some sense, although all 3 came to be very much associated with 60s culture, all 3 pretty much were more or less apolitical and even fairly traditional in their core outlook (Kerouac mainly considered On the Road a story about two catholic friends searching for God...)
Funny that all 3 of these were heavily tied into Ginsburg, the famous hard-leftist poet, but they each in different ways all rejected leftism to various degrees.
I find Dylan to be somehow the funniest example of that. During the entire 60s they all tried to make Dylan "the voice of our generation" a title he always refused. By 1967-68 Dylan moved to upstate New York with his wife Sara and kids....the town he lived in was very close to a little place called Woodstock.
The organizers of "Woodstock" entire goal was to setup a hippy music festival with Dylan serving as kind of the spiritual center of it all....they all converged on the that town because thats where Dylan lived and they thought they would be able to convince him to headline the festival. Sad for them, Dylan flatly refused, and was often calling the cops on the hippies who were trying to drop by his house to discuss things like politics and organic farming with him....
Its always hard for me to realize how early On the Road was written. Although it became a real hit in the 60s, it was obviously mostly written in very early 50s (about times in the late 40s!).
I read it when I was a freshman in college and the wild spirit appealed to me, but like lots of that kind of writing (ie. Bukowski), I'm not sure how appealing I would find it now.
Its certainly easy to see though why it was so influential. There is an interesting sort of undercurrent that connects Kerouac - Burroughs - Dylan together.
In some sense, although all 3 came to be very much associated with 60s culture, all 3 pretty much were more or less apolitical and even fairly traditional in their core outlook (Kerouac mainly considered On the Road a story about two catholic friends searching for God...)
Funny that all 3 of these were heavily tied into Ginsburg, the famous hard-leftist poet, but they each in different ways all rejected leftism to various degrees.
I find Dylan to be somehow the funniest example of that. During the entire 60s they all tried to make Dylan "the voice of our generation" a title he always refused. By 1967-68 Dylan moved to upstate New York with his wife Sara and kids....the town he lived in was very close to a little place called Woodstock.
The organizers of "Woodstock" entire goal was to setup a hippy music festival with Dylan serving as kind of the spiritual center of it all....they all converged on the that town because thats where Dylan lived and they thought they would be able to convince him to headline the festival. Sad for them, Dylan flatly refused, and was often calling the cops on the hippies who were trying to drop by his house to discuss things like politics and organic farming with him....