New York is the city that never sleeps – and it was particularly awake after WWII. Here are four key cities to visit, places that Kerouac knew and that still inspire the 'bug' that drew him across the country more than 60 years ago. But if the Beats can teach us anything about travel, it’s that every journey presents new opportunities. The hero is Dean Moriarty, based on Neal Cassady, a Coloradan who marks his trips with a 'wild yea-saying overburst of American joy.'Ĭan you travel the road in that same spirit today? Well, Kerouac tried in 1960, and failed, finding that interstates had come, bypassing many of the towns that he’d torn through a decade before. Other key Beats make the novel too, including the poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist William S Burroughs. Kerouac appears as the book’s narrator, Sal Paradise. The Beat bible, if there is one, is On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s mostly autobiographical novel about a series of aimless road trips taken from 1947 to 1950. And then they’d hit the road: crisscrossing the country in search of the new American dream – or just for kicks, music and women. They’d skip class to dig jazz and debate their place in Cold War America. The USA is a big country, and whenever anyone’s tried to define it – be they a Charles Dickens, a Mark Twain or a Stephen Fry – they’ve hit the road.
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