From the Archive: FUNNY WOMEN #139: Gap Year To-Do List
Water is a precious resource; my portable soda stream honors that fact.
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Posts Tagged: On the Road
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #221: Noah C. Lekas
“Hopefully, the takeaway is the journey.”
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The Queer Syllabus: Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
In The Queer Syllabus, writers nominate works for a new canon of queer literature.
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The Rumpus Interview with Erik Kennedy
Poet Erik Kennedy discusses literary community and his formative years as a young writer in New Jersey, and shares two new prose poems.
...moreThe Beats Come to Paris (Again)
The French obsession with America popular culture takes form at the Pompidou Center in Paris with relics from the Beat Generation, including the famous 120-foot scroll of Kerouac’s On the Road, in a comprehensive exhibit. Frank Rose reports the details for the New York Times.
...moreOn the Auction Table
The supposedly lost letter from Neal Cassady to Jack Kerouac that inspired Kerouac’s novel, On the Road, was found in 2014. Now, the letter is being auctioned off: The 16,000-word typed letter, which carries an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000, had been considered lost before it surfaced in the discarded files of Golden Goose Press, […]
...moreCardboard Cutouts
For the Guardian, Lynette Lounsbury shares her adolescent experience reading the beat writers and coming to realize that there was little “space” for women in the beatnik world: I read more Kerouac, The Dharma Bums my favourite, and then I read Cassady and Ginsberg and Burroughs. I loved the beat generation and the men in it. […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Sword and Her Sister
Frozen is a study in what happens when imagination is constrained to a single narrative arc
...moreMapping Literary Road Trips
What is more American than the road trip? Steven Melendez has created an astonishingly detailed interactive map of the beloved institution as documented in twelve works of American literature. The books featured include Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Mark Twain’s Roughing It, John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Acid […]
...moreConversations with Literary Ex-Cons: Jack Gantos
Jack Gantos discusses the sense of “delusional invincibility” he had in 1970s New York that led him to prison—and then on to a career as an award-winning children’s book author.
...moreOn the Road for non “beatnik groupies”
Craving to be a ‘50s vagabond like Kerouac’s Sal Paradise but fear traveling without your GPS? On the Road fans worry need not worry! Gregor Weichbrodt has “rewritten” the entire novel solely using Google Maps driving directions. The open-source book is fifty-five pages long and only features 17,527 miles. Weichbrodt says about his work, “If […]
...moreBeat-Era Collection Up for Auction in San Francisco
If you’re a fan of the Beats, you’ll want to check out the hundreds of books and other objects up for auction in San Francisco this Thursday. Featured items include a copy of On the Road signed by Neal Cassady (“the model for the Dean Moriarty character”) and a first-edition hardcover copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test autographed […]
...more“So Are You Helpless, Tragic, or Stupid?”
You may remember, from when it was featured on Longform.org, Vanessa Veselka’s GQ essay “The Truck Stop Killer,” about her life as a teenage hitchhiker and her narrow escape from a man who might have been a serial killer. Now, for the American Reader, Veselka pulls back for a more analytical take on the subject of road […]
...moreA Newer, Cuter Approach to Cover Design
Maybe you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can sure try. At 22 Words, a six-year-old tries to suss out the plots of classic novels by looking at their cover art. Wuthering Heights is a bit tricky, but she gets On the Road more or less right! Everyone, please try this at home […]
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Missing the Beat: The Story of Adapting Kerouac’s On The Road
In 1957, shortly after the publication of his second novel, On The Road, Jack Kerouac wrote a letter to Marlon Brando, pleading with him to buy the movie rights to the book.
...moreThe Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
I. Jack Kerouac looked like Jesus. In the ink sketch my dad did of him, Kerouac’s arms are outstretched to either side, his head in profile as though waiting for the lash.
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