Dwight Garner, Paper Cuts blogger for the New York Times and senior editor of The New York Times Book Review, calls Gilbert Millstein’s Sept. 5, 1957 review of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” “probably the most famous book review in the history of this newspaper.” The book, Millstein wrote, “is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’ and who’s principal avatar he is.” Kerouac saw the book review shortly after midnight that day, accompanied by Joyce Johnson. In a Vanity Fair piece that recalls that night, Johnson writes that Kerouac had a “weirdly flat response” to the review. 

Johnson writes:

At the time, I thought he was probably just tired—he had turned up at my apartment only a few hours earlier after a two-day trip from Orlando, Florida (I’d had to lend him $30 for the fare). As the years went by, I wondered whether he’d had a premonition then that the kind of attention he was about to receive would be his undoing. But now, 50 years later, after a close reading of On the Road: The Original Scroll—finally transcribed, word for word, from the roll of paper upon which Jack composed it in 1951—I realize something else about why Jack was unable to enjoy his moment of triumph. Secretly, he may have felt almost ashamed to have won it with a book compromised by all the changes, large and small, he had been forced to make or accept—a book he had also come to regard as a warm-up for the much wilder ones that followed.

Related on World Hum:
* ‘On the Road’ Sites, Including a Mexico City Sanborns, Then and Now
* Marking 50 Years of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’
* The Distance Between Then and Now