Books I Have Read More Than Once (6)

The First Third by Neal Cassady and On The Road by Jack Kerouac

The First Third, back cover:

Before he died in Mexico in 1968, just four days short of his 44th birthday, Neal Cassady had written the jacket blurb for this book: "Seldom has there been a story of a man so balled up. No doubt many reader will not believe the veracity of the author, but I assure these doubting Thomases that every incident, as such, is true..."

I read this book before I read On The Road. When I bought the book I thought of it as just a book about growing-up in Denver. I had no idea that Neal Cassady was a cult figure and one of the main characters in Jack Kerouac's book. Cassady spent most of his younger childhood in lower downtown Denver living with his father on Larimer Street; which at the time was Denver's skidrow. Most of that area had been torn down in a major urban renewal project when I was a kid but enough remained that I could follow young Neal as he made his mad dash through the streets of Denver.

On The Road, back cover:

"Jack Kerouac's On the Road was the Huckleberry Finn of the mid-twentieth century. Kerouac substituted the road for the river, the fast car for the slow raft, the hipster in search of freedom for the black slave in search of freedom....While Huck and Jim were floating down America's mile-wide aorta, while Sal Paradise and Dean Moriaarty were roaring across America's heart, they were helping to change the course of American prose."
-Aaron Latham, The New York Time Book Review

On The Road is a strange book for me. I've read it about four times but I can not give you a summary of the basic storyline because I don't really remember it. I can only repeat a line from the movie Animal House,"Road trip." For me Jack Kerouac is like Ernest Hemingway, someone I am told is a great writer but who's works mostly leave me cold. I think I keep rereading On The Road hoping that someday I will stumble across the reason why Kerouac is held in such reverence.