On the Road Post 3

3.In 1952 (when people still wrote letters to each other), Allen Ginsberg penned these words to Kerouac about the manuscript of On the Road: "I don't see how it will ever be published, it's so personal, it's so full of sex language, so full of our local mythological references, I don't know if it would make sense to any publisher." What is your reaction to this?

I think that Ginsberg was worried that the book wouldn’t be published because it was too real. Kerouac didn’t cover up any part of the early 1950s; he showed the dirty parts and the beautiful parts. Kerouac wrote a story about a lifestyle that, though common, was rarely spoken about. He was able to capture the time period in a book much like F. Scott Fitzgerald did with the Great Gatsby and John Steinbeck with Grapes of Wrath. The sexual language and the mythological references were all a part of this time period. Because the story was very open with its language, it became more personal and drew the reader in.

Kerouac’s writing defiantly challenged the beliefs of the early 1950 time period. At one point Sal wishes to be an African American exclaiming that the Caucasian world was not as exciting as the African American world. “At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.”(Part 3, Ch. 1) There are a lot of reasons that the book could have been a failure, and if the story were written by any other author it probably would have been, but Kerouac’s amazing language and descriptive skill outshone the controversial views of his time period making the story a success.