On the Road (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Post-World War II America

The last part of World War II was the birth of the atomic age. The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan to surrender. The United States emerged from the wreckage of the war as the leader of the Western world. Veterans returned to their homes, families, schools, and jobs. The United States was poised to become one of the greatest economic powers in history. However, there was an increasing anxiety caused by the atomic bomb and the beginning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Great Britain, gave a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in which he declared: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." Churchill warned that the United States and its allies had to be on guard against Soviet expansionism. His remarks seemed prescient when, in June 1948, the Soviet Union began the Berlin blockade, cutting off Berlin from the West. The United States began a vast airlift to keep Berlin supplied with food and fuel. In August 1949 tensions increased even further when the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic device. The events of the late 1940s led to the anti-communist witch-hunts engineered by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

On the Road is not a political novel, but it is hard to imagine that Kerouac was not influenced by the atmosphere in America at the time. The horrors of the war, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, and the growing sense of intolerance in the United States had to offend his sensibilities. If anything, these events pushed him even further into his disassociation from the values of the society in which he lived. There are a few passages in the novel that hint at Kerouac's concerns, for example when Old Bull Lee discusses with Sal the possibility of mankind one day communicating with the dead:

When a man dies he undergoes a mutation in his brain that we know nothing about now but which will be very clear someday if scientists get on the ball. The bastards right now are only interested in seeing if they can blow up the world.

Here it is demonstrated that even these characters, living outside of "respectable" society, cannot escape the shadow of the bomb.

The Beat Generation

In his book, The Birth of the Beat Generation, Steven Watson writes:

By the strictest definition, the Beat Generation consists of only William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Herbert Huncke, with the slightly later addition of Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky. By the most sweeping usage, the term includes most of the innovative poets associated with San Francisco, Black Mountain College, and New York's Downtown scene. Using the broad definition, the Beat Generation is marked by a shared interest in spiritual liberation, manifesting itself in candid personal content and open forms, in verse and prose, thus leading to admiration for Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and other avant-garde writers.

According to Ann Charters, editor of The Portable Beat Reader, the word "beat" was "primarily in use after World War II by jazz musicians and hustlers as a slang term meaning down and out, or poor and exhausted." The word's street usage was introduced to Kerouac by a Times Square hustler and drug addict named Herbert Huncke. Kerouac was attracted to what he believed to be the elusive, mysterious quality of the word. In a later conversation with his friend, writer John Clellon Holmes, Kerouac first coined the phrase that captured the essence of the vision he shared with Ginsberg, Burroughs and others. Charters writes:

As Holmes recalled the conversation, Kerouac replied, "It's a kind of furtiveness Like we were a generation of furtives. You know, with an inner knowledge that there's no use flaunting on that level, the level of the "public," a kind of beatness — I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are — and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world. So I guess you might say we're a beat generation."

Holmes went on to write an essay for The New York Times, "This Is the Beat Generation," in an attempt to describe the disaffiliation with society that many young people, such as Kerouac, felt in post-World War II America. However, it wasn't until Kerouac published On the Road in 1957, shortly after Ginsberg published Howl and Other Poems, that the Beat Generation and the Beat literary movement captivated the American public. There was some public backlash (for example, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen snidely coined the word "beatniks" in reference to the West Coast youth involved in the movement), and in reply Kerouac wrote that "beat" also had a deeper spiritual meaning, as in "beatific." However, Kerouac himself had little patience with the "hipsters" wearing their goatees and berets; he thought many who jumped on the Beat bandwagon were poseurs, even conformists. Later, in the sixties, Kerouac disassociated himself from the "beatniks" as they evolved into "hippies."