‘On the Road’ and Jack Kerouac still inspire

Nearly 40 years after his death, students re-enact his improvised trips

You know it when you see it: Hip is the flow of Jack Kerouac’s 'bop prosody'

Most popular

• Most viewed

• Top rated

• Most e-mailed

Mexican raid kills drug cartel ‘Boss of Bosses’

Recession hits Rust Belt’s steel towns hard

Boy Scout returns purse with nearly $2,000

Chapter closing on lone Laredo bookstore

Poll: Obama approval dips below 50 percent

Most viewed on msnbc.com

updated 4:35 p.m. ET Sept. 2, 2007

LOWELL, Mass. - Manya Callahan, manager of the Barnes & Noble Downtown store, sees them all the time, young and old, looking for books by Lowell’s most famous citizen.

“They’re usually wearing backpacks and they kind of have a sense of adventure about them,” she says. “They walk inside, looking kind of nervous, then go up to me and ask if I have anything by Jack Kerouac.”

Nearly 40 years after his death, and a half century after the release of his most famous novel, “On the Road,” Kerouac remains an author who inspires motion. Students still re-enact his rambling, improvised trips across the country. Baby boomers retrace their own youthful journeys. Tourists seek out Kerouac landmarks, like this mill town the author left as a teenager but to which he always returned.

Story continues below ↓

advertisement | your ad here

Some celebrities are ignored, or shunned, by their hometowns, but Kerouac’s name is easily found in Lowell, with its red brick buildings, winding canals and cobblestone streets. You can start at the Visitors Center where Kerouac walking tours are offered and maps handed out, noting such attractions as his actual birthplace and a favorite bar.

Kerouac has his own park, shaded by weeping willow trees and centered by a circle of granite columns inscribed with excerpts from “On the Road” and other works. A few miles south, at the Edson Cemetery, his marker is ever adorned with stray tributes. Recent leavings include cigarettes, a bandanna, black flip flops and a note, stabbed into the bare ground by a pencil, that reads, “The only people for me are the mad ones. Here’s to you Jack!”

Helen Bassett, 16 and a resident of Eastbourne, England, was a recent visitor to Lowell. She read “On the Road” last year and was immediately drawn to Kerouac’s musical, conversational prose, so much more accessible, she says, than the classics she’s assigned at school.

Image: Jack Kerouac's "On The Road"
TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP/Getty Images
Based on Jack Kerouac's adventures with Neal Cassady, "On the Road" tells the story of two friends whose four cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience.
When Bassett and her father decided to travel to Boston this summer, they arranged a side trip to Lowell, where Helen enjoyed a Kerouac exhibit at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, went to the Kerouac park and bought four Kerouac books and a poster at Barnes & Noble.

“I really related to ‘On the Road,”’ says Helen, who is urging her friends to read it. “I’ve always wanted to move abroad; I never thought I would stay in the same place.”

Kerouac’s novel takes readers all over the country, from New York City and New Orleans to Chicago and Denver and San Francisco, all stops on the wild and fictionalized adventures of Kerouac and buddy Neal Cassady, renamed and beloved as Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty.

Kerouac, not known as a friend of the businessman in his own time, has become especially good for Lowell’s economy. With the decline of the mills, tourism and the arts have become important attractions. Lowell City Manager Bernard Lynch says that when he’s trying to bring new jobs into town, Kerouac is a good name to drop.

Slideshow
The week in celebrity sightings
Teen Choice honors hotties, Brad Pitt goes green, Steve Buscemi has a heart.
more photos
“I won’t say that he’s our only selling point, but when we meet with a business or meet with developers looking to build housing, one of our big selling points is the culture of the city, and Kerouac is part of that,” Lynch says.

Lynch acknowledges that Kerouac is not universally admired; his popularity seemed to grow the less people were around him. Most in Lowell were too young, or lived elsewhere, and were spared firsthand memories of his drunken decline. When they think of Kerouac, they think of his books. Others knew the man.

Brendan Fleming is 81, born just a few years after Kerouac. He is a former mayor of Lowell and was a longtime city councilman. Asked to discuss Kerouac’s behavior in the 1960s, he laughs and notes that he still remembers his “exploits, shall we say.” When the council voted 7-to-1 for the Kerouac park, Fleming was the dissenter.

“I didn’t think, and I still don’t think, that this particular person would be the best example for our children,” Fleming says. “And there were other people who we could have voted for, like (Air Force commander) Hoyt Vandenberg — he came from Lowell — or Bette Davis. Kerouac is not someone about whom I want to say, ‘This is the type of person who comes from Lowell.”