When Jack Kerouac published On the Road in 1957, he presented the novel as the product of a single marathon writing binge. It was a method he had been working on since the late 1940s that his friend Allen Ginsberg dubbed “spontaneous bop prosody”.
Despite the manuscript actually being a synthesis of years of ten years of notes and fragments (as this film shows), the press went mad for the myth of spontaneous prose. What could be more exciting at the height of the cold war than presenting the US as the place of ultimate freedom and possibility, something apparently unavailable to non-western or socialist nations?
On the Road seemed to be an organic, undiluted product of America. It poured out raw and thick from the mind of a man whose voice was marketed as a synthesis of the repressed forces that lay buried beneath the veneer of American postwar prosperity. The US “culture industry” burned heavy diesel in the promotion of Kerouac.
