Couldn’t resist another couple links to late-arriving pieces about the 50th anniversary of “On the Road.” The first one’s a chuckler from New York Times columnist David Brooks. He imagines how the book’s protagonist, Sal Paradise, would act if he were alive now: “He’d be driving a Prius, going a conscientious 55, wearing a seat belt and calling Mom from the Comfort Inns.”
Sure thing, Mr. Brooks.
The New Yorker weighed in, too, with Louis Menand’s full-blown examination of what “ On the Road” and the beats meant. “Nostalgia is part of the appeal of ‘On the Road’ today,” he writes, “but it was also part of its appeal in 1957. For it is not a book about the nineteen-fifties. It’s a book about the nineteen-forties.”
Related on World Hum:
* Enough Already With the Kerouac!
* Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’: 22 Great Links
