Enough Already With the Kerouac!

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 09.07.07 | 12:31 PM ET

We’ve spent the week celebrating the 50th anniversary of “On the Road.” By now, some have had more than enough. Actually, some had already had enough 50 years ago when the novel debuted. Herewith, a sampling of what Kerouac naysayers have been saying:

Back then:

Robert R. Kirsch in the Oct. 4, 1957 Los Angeles Times:

The novel (if by any stretch of definition this can be called a novel) has gone into its third printing, which merely proves that there is a fairly substantial group of readers today who care nothing at all for such trivial matters as plot, characterization, style and story.

Mr. Kerouac may one day be a good writer, but that day will come when he stops riding around in a compulsive search for “material” and settles down to learn some of the first things about the craft.

This week:

Cynthia Ozick in the Sept. 2 Los Angeles Times:

My zealously churlish response: At the acme of his celebrity, I thought Kerouac a purveyor of frenzied fakery, of pseudo-mystical junk; and I do not depart now from the intelligent judgment of my youth.

Jessa Crispin in Bookslut Sept. 6, in response to Walter Kirn’s take on the novel:

Oh please, please make it stop. Can the On the Road anniversary be over now, so I no longer have to read about 50-year-old men all nostalgic for that one time they hitchhiked and how freeing it was?

Yes, Jessa, the “On the Road” anniversary can indeed be over. No more Kerouac anniversaries. This is the end of it.

Wait, when was The Dharma Bums published?

Photo by ZeroOne via Flickr, (Creative Commons).