Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) defined the beat generation. Here are some excerpts that have particular meaning for me from his book On the Road Read this book and get a feel for Kerouac's wonderful speech style writing.
Excerpts:
What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?--it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy adventure beneath the skies.
I wished Dean and Carlo were there--then I realized they'd be out of place and unhappy. They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.
We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.
A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.
When I found him in Mill City that morning, he had fallen on the beat and evil days that come to young guys in their middle twenties.
I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was--I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds.
We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.
My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness. But Dean knew this; he'd mentioned it many times.
