![]() ![]() ![]() Nearly half a century before I read it, Jack Kerouac wrote the novel that The New York Times’ Gilbert Millstein (in his glowing and lengthy review) called “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as “beat”, and whose principal avatar he is.”īurroughs, himself a member of that core group of “Beat” generation writers, wasn’t exaggerating when he said that. When I first read these lines, in the heightened madness of adolescence, I remember being astounded by how visceral (and weirdly Onomatopoeia-ic) they felt - Kerouac’s words were unlike anything I’d read before, even though my teenage self was surrounded by the words of Kafka, Salinger, Kesey, Dostoevsky and others. ![]() ![]() “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’” ![]()
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