Slate joins the 50th Anniversary celebration of “On the Road” this week with coverage that, among other things, addresses this question: How did Sal Paradise, the protagonist of “On the Road” and the No. 1 pick in our list of 10 Greatest Fictional Travelers, influence Ryan Bingham, the main character in Walter Kirn’s “Up in the Air” and our No. 9 greatest fictional traveler? In an e-mail conversation with Meghan O’Rourke, Kirn points to his personal absorption in Kerouac’s classic. 

Kirn adds that “Up in the Air” is “about a character with Kerouac’s restlessness who covered much the same territory as he did but traveled in jets, at 30,000 feet, where a sense of autonomy is impossible, where landscapes are blurs obscured by clouds, and where encounters with other people are brief, superficial, and, of course, unnecessary. While writing the book, I liked to think that Kerouac foresaw this disembodied America and that this vision made his project urgent and may have even accounted for On the Road’s peculiar tone of premature nostalgia.”

Slate’s other coverage includes a slide show featuring images of Kerouac and scenes from the U.S. and Mexico, as well as a bit of oral history from, among others, Kerouac’s former agent, Sterling Lord; Neal Cassady’s former wife, Carolyn Cassady; and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Related on World Hum:
* Will ‘On the Road’ Ever Be Made Into a Movie?
* ‘On the Road’ Sites, Including a Mexico City Sanborns, Then and Now
* The Distance Between Then and Now