Jack Kerouac

(1922-1969)

"Dean, don't drive so fast in the daytime."

"Don't worry, man, I know what I'm doing." I began to flinch. Dean came up on lines of cars like the Angel of Terror. He almost rammed them along as he looked for an opening. He teased their bumpers, he eased and pushed and craned around to see the curve, then the huge car leaped to his touch and passed, and always by a hair we made it back to our side as other lines filed by in the opposite direction and I shuddered. I couldn't take it anymore. It is only seldom that you find a long Nebraskan straightaway in Iowa, and when we finally hit one Dean made his usual 110 and I saw flashing by outside several scenes that I remembered from 1947--a long stretch where Eddie and I had been stranded two hours. All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in nightmare day.

"Ah hell, Dean, I'm going in the back seat, I can't stand it any more, I can't look."

"Hee-hee-hee!" tittered Dean and he passed a car on a narrow bridge and swerved in the dust and roared on....

On the Road

REMEMBERING JACK KEROUAC

Writers are, in a way, very powerful indeed.
They write the script for the reality film.
Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold
a million pairs of Levis to both sexes.
Woodstock rises from his pages.
Now if writers could get together into a real tight
union, we'd have the world right by the words.
We could write our own universes, and they would
all be as real as a coffee bar or a pair of Levis
or a prom in the Jazz Age. Writers could
take over the reality studio. So they must not
be allowed to find out that they can make
it happen. Kerouac understood this long
before I did. Life is a dream, he said.

from White Fields Press Published in Heaven Poster Series #10 Poster includes photo "Allen Ginsberg taking photograph of William S. Burroughs: Lawrence, Kansas 1992" courtesy of Allen Ginsberg.