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Individuals live not only their own lives but also the life of the times.
Jack Kerouac is remembered as the Beat writer of the Fifties, the one whose most famous novel became the backpack bible of the Sixties. On the Road was considered “innovative, hip, cool,” and was charged with the celebrity of the author, promoted as “a literary James Dean.”1 Kerouac himself showcased these aspects of himself—partly because the myth sold books and partly, I suggest, because he was haunted by a secret story with a darker cast—one that he wished to conceal even as he felt pressed to tell it.
His work and its significance began a decade earlier, and are rooted in the events of the Forties. He was 23 in 1947 when he began On the Road (1957), in the shadow of a victorious but devastating war that had deeply affected him and his generation of young men.2 On the Road appears to be about restless young men roaming the country, getting drunk and getting laid. But beneath the manic diversions of the novel lurk (and are illuminated by it) the dreads and dangers of war—not only the personal terrors that Kerouac endured, but the ones of our own era as well.
Kerouac came of age in wartime America. In his description of a dream that he called “the Horace Mann hill and the S.S. Dorchester at [the] foot of it” (Kerouac, , p. 33), he encom-passed the fall from a peacetime adolescence to wartime adult-hood.