The Book Beat reading group will be discussing Kerouac’s seminal beat novel On the Road at 7 PM, June 29th at the Goldfish Teahouse in Royal Oak. The reading group is free and open to the public. For more information, please call Book Beat at 248-968-1190. Copies of On the Road are discounted 15% at the Book Beat.
“The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream.” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 7
“LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets.” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 13
“I want to be like him. He’s never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he’s the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you’ll finally get it.” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 4
“At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.”
– Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 1
“What’s your road, man?–holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.”
– Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 4, Ch. 1
“By the time fame crashed on his doorstep in 1957, Kerouac had already been done with On the Road for several years, but he hadn’t found much early success getting someone to publish the book. It could have been that America wasn’t ready for his stream-of-consciousness tale of jazz, sex, and fast, aimless driving on an open road. He would soon be a literary star, but on the eve of the book’s publication, Kerouac actually had to borrow money for a bus ticket to New York from his girlfriend at the time, Joyce Johnson.” – from NPR’s multi-media page for On the Road,