From Ann Charter S Kerouac

From Ann Charter’s Kerouac:

22—This stream of fantasies, visions, myths, dreams, vanities—Kerouac used all these words for them—made up his life. They were the legend that he felt his life became. And they became more than this. In the intensity of the vision he had of his confused life he caught the dreams of a generation: the feeling that at some point something had been together, that there was a special vision they all shared, a romantic ideal that called on the road just ahead. To this generation Jack Kerouac became a romantic hero, an archetypal rebel, the symbol of their own vanities, the symbol of their romantic legend. He never understood this. He was a man whose life was directed by what he felt under his skin, not inside his head. If he had understood it he wouldn’t have written it. But as he wrote it down the legend became, finally, the one reality of his life.

83—Jack was too late to join the covered wagon trains, but he wanted to come as close as possible to their style and their experience of the West. In his imagination the “one long red line” of Route 6 heading to California without a break was the trail of the American pioneers a hundred years before. Like the adventurous American settlers before him, Kerouac wanted the long red line of the setting sun in his eyes as he covered ground heading for California.

From Tom Clark’s Jack Kerouac:

x—William Burrough’s quote: Kerouac was a writer. That is, he wrote. Many people who call themselves writers and have their names on books are not writers and they can’t write—the difference being, a bullfighter who fights a bull is different from a bullshitter who makes passes with no bull there. The writer has been there or he can’t write about it. And going there he risks being gored. By that I mean what the Germans aptly call the Time Ghost—for example, such a fragile ghost world as Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age…What are writers, and I will confine the use of this term to writers of novels, trying to do? They are trying to create a universe in they have lived or would like to live. To write they must go there and submit to conditions which they may not have bargained for. Sometimes, as in the case of Fitzgerald and Kerouac, the effect produced by a writer is immediate, as if a generation were waiting to be written.

From Keith L. Justice’s Bestseller Index: All Books, Publishers Weekly and The New York Times Through 1990:

On the Road, NYT fiction 10/6/57 at #14; peaked at #11 on 10/27/57 (two weeks); five weeks total