At 2 o’clock in the morning we found a dive motel on Lombard Street, slept a few hours, and the next day we headed east. We hung out at City Lights Bookstore, founded by Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and had a drink next door at Vesuvio, and another one at Enrico’s, both places where the Beats caroused. We hightailed it north to the Beat metropolis of San Francisco. The Autoweek cover story framed in the Beat section of City Lights book store in San Francisco. We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move. “ Here we go!” And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her he was back in his element, everybody could see that. We loaded the DeVille with junk food and stacks of books on Beat poetry, and we were off. I drove up from LA and picked up Delaney at his Ventura home, high above the rolling Pacific. He was the perfect road-trip companion.Ĭadillac, for its part, graciously provided a Sedan DeVille, something for which I am still grateful. He was always ready for adventure and never wanted to quit if things got a little discombobulated. He’d once helped me film a video about an Acura NSX that I thought would be a hilarious hit but which never saw the light of day (he didn’t mind). He was the guy I picked when I needed someone who wouldn’t whine like an artist, who could camp out in the desert for three days and still be cheerful. Or as close to Dean Moriarty as I was going to get. Delaney was, in a more relaxed, more responsible way, a lot like Dean Moriarty. I would follow one of Kerouac’s wanders in a car he would have used.įor my Dean Moriarty, I picked my friend and Autoweek photographer Bill Delaney.
(This was back when you could get away with these things.) I proposed a story. Twenty years ago I wrote a tribute to the novel. Indeed, after several years of cross-country rambling, Kerouac returned to his Lowell, Massachusetts, home and spent most of the rest of his life there, drinking himself to death just 12 years after On The Road forced him into reluctant celebrity. Kerouac never would have gone on any of the trips without his friend’s urging. Cassady took Kerouac, aka Sal Paradise, on numerous journeys from east to west, north to south, and even into Mexico. On the most fundamental level, Kerouac’s novel celebrated his coast-to-coast driving adventures with his manic friend Neal Cassady, given the name Dean Moriarty in the book.
On The Road celebrated not only the movement of a road trip, but the optimism that came with it, the belief that no matter how hopeless or stagnate things had become wherever you were, there was bound to be something better somewhere else-all you had to do was get there. Suddenly students, readers and even highbrow professors could enjoy the act of reading so much that they wouldn’t even realize that their understanding of the human condition had just been elevated. With On The Road, the great American road trip was legitimized at the same time the great American novel was democratized. When Jack Kerouac’s On The Road appeared in 1957, it changed not only the idea of the classic American novel, but the whole notion of what a novel could be, and it did it in such an entertaining and easy-to-eat way that the whole concept of literature was suddenly taken from college professors in tweed jackets, turtle necks and jaunty goatees and passed down to anyone who could read.
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