Jack Kerouac

2 Pages 507 Words

Expository Essay
When asked to choose one book to be placed in my local school district’s public library my decision was easy. Over the course of my life I have read many books but there has always been one that stuck out in my mind. One that I could relate to and use as advice in my journey through life. On the Road, written by an ingenious free-spirit of the 50’s and 60’s, Jack Kerouac.
In the time of the 50’s and 60’s when the average American was drinking Coca Cola, enjoying TV dinners, and watching I love Lucy on their black and white television there was Jack Kerouac, behind the scenes. A man completely ahead of his time, at the right time in America. At a time when the country was wide open with society and government keeping there distance, all you simply had to do for change was stick out your thumb.
Kerouac was a writer from Massachusetts. He graduated from Columbia University and in the late 1940’s became a member of what was soon to be called, “the Beat Generation”. He wrote the book On the Road in three weeks although it took him seven years of spontaneous traveling to acquire its accounts. His wandering way of life was so rebellious of the times that his work was not praised until decades later.
In the book On the Road, Kerouac plays an unsettling, insightful traveler on his own personal endeavor to search for an answer. To what question only Kerouac knows. His travels begin in Paterson, NJ, and over the course of seven years, never returning home, he manages to cross from east coast to west coast several times. With his friends Allen Ginsberg, Neil Cassady, and William Burroughs he encounters situations unheard of by the average man. With a notepad in hand he reveals consciousness itself, detailing every socialistic aspect of himself and others. Walking to the “Beat” of the jazz his spirit sends him soaring through a world of colorful, unpredictable adventures.
Growing up as a you...