From The Writer’s Almanac
Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road came out on this day in 1957, the story of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty roaring across America—the book that defined the Beat Generation. In the opening pages, Kerouac wrote: “I’d been poring over maps of the United States for months, even reading books about the pioneers and savoring names like Platte and Cimarron and so on, and on the road-map was one long red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely, Nevada, and there dipped down to Los Angeles. I’ll just stay on 6 all the way to Ely, I said to myself, and confidently started.” The book got good reviews: The September 5 New York Times review called it “the most beautifully executed utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat’.”