Doing the Beats: Kerouac, sexuality and On the Road
The long-awaited film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking novel presents the perfect opportunity to re-examine the lives of the Beat Generation, writes Richard Watts. It’s not hyperbole to say that the Beat Generation – a small coterie of writers who met up in New York City in the spring of 1944 – changed the world. Without their individual quests for personal freedoms – a quest for sex and drugs before there was rock and roll; a quest which spawned the western world’s first counter-culture, the beatniks – the hippy movement of the Sixties would never have happened, and punk would have been a quiet snarl rather than a global reaction. Of all the Beat Generation writers, Jack Kerouac, author of the autobiographical beatnik bible, On the Road , is unequivocally the most famous. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922, to working class French-Canadian parents, Kerouac aspired to be a writer from a young age, though he was also a keen football player. Indeed, it ...
Comments
I was just settling down to a sedate, suburban, mindlessness and you keep titillating me with these snippets of adventure!
Let my life stay dull and unadventurous.
(do I sound like a nerdy shut in or what?!??!)
Hot.
Sorry, but someone had to lift the tone.
I wonder if Jack and Ianto are holding hands behind Gwen's back. Come to think of it I suppose they could be doing almost anything back there.