The parting of the Gray Lady’s payveils reveals a bunch of articles about Jack Kerouac. Here are some of my favorites. A recent essay on a 1964 “great American pilgrimage on Kerouac’s ‘holy road’."
What I quickly learned was that buses were the way poor people traveled long distance, people who couldn’t afford planes, trains or cars. Many of my fellow passengers, and more and more the farther south I went, were African-American. Unpacking the single sentence in chapter two of On the Road recounting Kerouac’s first faltering steps, this is probably my favorite thing written about the book in the last ten years. In all probability, his journey began at the elevated train station at Liberty Avenue and Rockaway Boulevard in Ozone Park. There, according to Joe Cunningham, a subway historian, he would have boarded a train consisting of six old wooden cars and taken it to Rockaway Avenue in Brooklyn. Ozone Park has largely forgotten Kerouac. “I never heard of him, but I went to school in Ecuador,” said Adriana Loga, 24, who then dialed her boss and handed over the phone. “You’re wasting your time,” the boss said. “No one there even understands what you’re talking about.” On Kerouac’s dénouement in Northport, Long Island, from 1958—1964: We used to wonder how he’d get so drunk on just a couple of bar drinks, until we found out he was taking swigs of his own bottle in the bathroom. Well, we ended that.
