Dating the story

The Catcher in the Rye takes place in the late 1940s to the early 1950s, which is about the time the novel was written. World War II was over and the atomic bomb, which was mentioned in the book, had already been invented. The death of Allie, Holden's younger brother, is given to be July 18, 1946, and it is stated Holden was 13 at that time. It follows, therefore, that the bulk of the story takes place in approximately December of 1949 and the story's "present" is the summer of 1950. Given that Christmas fell on a Sunday in 1949, the two days that consume most of the novel are most likely December 18 and 19; if it were one week later, the second day of Holden's romp would be Christmas, and if it were one week earlier, Pencey would be letting its students out two full weeks before Christmas.

The canon of the Beat Generation: poetry by Allen Ginsberg, On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

The Beat Generation was a group of American writers who came to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), and William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959) are often considered their most important works.

Kerouac introduced the phrase Beat Generation sometime around 1948 to describe his friends and as a general term describing the underground, anti-conformist youth gathering in New York at that time to the novelist John Clellon Holmes (who published an early novel about the beat generation, titled Go, in 1952, along with a manifesto of sorts in the New York Times Magazine: "This is the beat generation"). The adjective beat (introduced to the group by Herbert Huncke) had the connotations of "tired" or "down and out," but Kerouac added the paradoxical connotations of upbeat, beatific, and the musical association of being "on the beat."

Calling this relatively small group of struggling writers, students, hustlers, and drug addicts a "generation" was to make the claim that they were representative and important—the beginnings of a new trend, analogous to the influential Lost Generation.

In trying to define the "Beat Generation" it's important to note that "Beat Generation" was originally a reference, not only to Kerouac's inner-circle, but to the burgeoning counter-culture. The press attached to the name "Beat Generation" as a reference to only a small group of writers, friends of Ginsberg, Kerouac or Burroughs. Thus the joke among Beat writers (attributed to both Gregory Corso and Gary Snyder) persisted in various forms: "Three friends do not make a generation." The press also mistakenly pointed to Ginsberg and Kerouac as leaders. This often leads to confusion about who actually belongs in the so-called "Beat Generation." Writers who may qualify as part of the "Beat Generation" may deny they were ever a part of it based on this limiting definition the press had given it. For example, they'll say they're friends with Ginsberg and Kerouac, not followers. This leads to two ways to identify writers as members of the "Beat Generation," a broad and narrow definition. A narrow definition of the Beat Generation would include only the closest friends who relatively consistently defined themselves as "Beat" writers; this list may include: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky. If "Beat Generation" is defined broadly, this smaller group is often just called "The New York Beats," though Orlovsky had little connection with New York. William S. Burroughs, one of the most important figures of this group, always adamantly denied he was a part of the "Beat Generation," but an accurate list of the close inner-circle would have to include him. Even Kerouac in his later career denied he was part of the "Beat Generation." In this sense movements like the San Francisco Renaissance and the Black Mountain poets would be completely separate movements.

The members of the Beat Generation were new bohemian ecstatic epicureans, who often engaged in a spontaneous creativity. The style of their work may seem chaotic, but the chaos was purposeful; it highlighted the primacy of such Beat Generation essentials as spontaneity, open emotion, visceral engagement in often gritty worldly experiences. The beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style.

Jack Kerouac (pronounced [dʒæk kɛrwæk]) (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist, writer, poet, and artist. He is perhaps the best known of a group of writers and friends who came to be known as the Beat Generation.

Kerouac enjoyed some degree of popular appeal but little critical acclaim during his lifetime. He is now, however, considered to be one of America's most important and influential authors. His spontaneous, confessional prose style has inspired numerous other writers and musicians, including Tom Robbins, Lester Bangs, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan. Kerouac's best known works are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur and Visions of Cody.

Kerouac divided most of his young adult life between roaming the vast American landscape and life at home with his mother. Faced with a changing post-war America, he sought to find his place, but came to eventually reject the values and social norms of the Fifties. His writing often reflects a desire to break free from society's structures and to find higher meaning.

This search led Kerouac to experiment with drugs and to embark on trips around the world. His writings are often credited as the catalyst for the 1960s counterculture. Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida, at the age of forty-seven from an internal hemorrhage, the result of chronic alcoholism.

Kerouac is considered by some as the King of the Beats as well as the Father of the Hippies, although it must be said that he actively disliked such labels, and, in particular, regarded the Hippie movement with some disdain. Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of Jazz, especially the Bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others. Later, Kerouac would include ideas he developed in his Buddhist studies, beginning with Gary Snyder. He called this style Spontaneous Prose, a literary technique akin to stream of consciousness.

Kerouac's motto was "first-thought=best thought", and many of his books exemplified this approach including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans. The central features of this writing method was the idea of breath (borrowed from Jazz and from Buddhist meditation breathing), improvising words over the inherent structures of mind and language, and not editing a single word (much of his work was edited by Donald Merriam Allen, a major figure in Beat Generation poetry who also edited some of Ginsberg's work as well). Connected with his idea of breath was the elimination of the period, preferring to use a long, connecting dash instead. As such, the phrases occurring between dashes might resemble improvisational jazz licks. When spoken, the words might take on a certain kind of rhythm, though none of it pre-meditated.

On the Road is a novel by Jack Kerouac, written in April 1957. This largely autobiographical work, written as a stream of consciousness and based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America, is often considered a defining work of the postwar Beat Generation that was inspired by jazz, poetry, and drug experiences. As the inspiration came from real life, hundreds of references in On the Road have real-world counterparts.

The book became an overnight success, and gathered an epic mythos that was worthy of its fame. As the story goes, On the Road was written by Kerouac in three weeks while living with his second wife, Joan Haverty, in an apartment at 454 West Twentieth Street in Manhattan, which he typed on one long scroll of teletype paper, which Kerouac called "the roll." The roll does exist — it was purchased in 2001 by Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, for $2.4 million — and it was indeed typed in a blazing three weeks, with no margins, single-spaced, and no paragraph breaks. But the myth of the story overlooks some of the finer points of the novel's composition. Much of the book was actually written as it happened, over the seven years of Kerouac's travels, in the small notebooks that he always carried with him and wrote in during his spare time. The myth also overlooks the tedious organization and preparation that came before Kerouac's creative explosion, as well as the fact that Kerouac revised the novel several times before Malcolm Cowley of Viking Press agreed to publish it.

As of 2006, the book is to be the subject of a forthcoming film, also titled On the Road. Walter Salles is signed to direct, and casting is scheduled to begin later in the year.

Viking Press hopes to publish an uncensored version of the book, containing elements that were deemed unsuitable when it was first published, by the end of 2007, the 50th anniversary of its original publication. Also, Viking plans to fulfill Kerouac's unrealized desire to "...reinsert my pantheon of uniform names..." or in other words remove the pseudonyms used for the characters throughout the book, thus the opening sentence, "I first met Dean Moriarty..." would be changed to "I first met Neal Cassady..."

Michael McClure, a poet in San Francisco who was involved with the Beats said that "the world that [they] trembling stepped out into in that decade was a bitter, gray one." In his article "Scratching the Beat Surface," he describes the time as "locked in the Cold War and the first Asian debacle," in "the gray, chill, militaristic silence...the intellective void...the spiritual drabness."

This is the world in which Kerouac takes his journeys that become the material for On the Road. Salvadore (a.k.a. Sal) Paradise, the narrator of On the Road and the character identified as Kerouac's alter ego, is a literate keeper of American culture. We become intimately aware of an elusive narrator, but fixated upon the epic hero of the novel, Dean Moriarty (a pseudonym for Neal Cassady, who was also a part of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters). The narrator tells us in the opening paragraph that "with the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of [his] life you could call [his] life on the road." Dean is the instigator and the inspiration for the journey that Sal will make, the journey that he will record.

The characters are introduced to us in brief vignettes, in a way reminiscent of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; New York City is the starting point, and Sal wants us to understand the people we will be dealing with. The arrival of Dean is the catalyst; Sal describes him as “simply a youth tremendously excited with life.” He also sees “a kind of holy lightning...flashing from his excitement and his visions." When Dean meets Carlo Marx (a pseudonym for Allen Ginsberg), Sal’s closest friend in the city, Sal tells us that a “tremendous thing happened," and that the meeting of Dean and Carlo was a meeting between “the holy con-man with the shining mind [Dean], and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx." Sal remarks that “everything that was to come began then”, in their meeting. Carlo tells Dean about the friends around the country, their experiences, and Sal is telling us that he is following them “because the only people for [him] 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 common place thing, but burn burn burn...”

Sal describes Dean’s criminal tendencies as “a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy...something new, long prophesied, long a-coming (he only stole cars for joy rides).” The early descriptions of Dean establish a religious motif; people and their personalities are regularly referred to as holy or prophesied. Dean is “a western kinsman of the sun”, and this pagan comparison is yet another supernatural moment in the description of Dean Moriarty. Sal introduces him as the savior of his generation; Sal says that “all [of his] New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired...reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.”

Sal’s journey continues with his arrival in Chicago. He dates the narrative at 1947, marking it as a specific era in jazz history, “somewhere between its Charlie Parker Ornithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis,” and it inspires Sal to think of his friends “from one end of the country to the other…doing something so frantic and rushing about.” Sal doesn’t say what they are frantically doing, and this is the premise of the narrative. Sal is hardly immune from this. After napping in Des Moines, he wakes up, “and that was the one distinct time in [his] life...when [he] didn’t know who [he] was.”

In San Francisco, Sal confronts social expectations. He takes a job as a night watchman at a boarding camp for merchant sailors waiting for their ship. When he finds the work distasteful, he tells his supervisor that he “wasn’t cut out to be a cop.” In response, Sal is reminded that “it’s [his] duty.... [He] can’t compromise with things like this.” Sal’s aversion to commitment and duty ensure that he does not hold this job for long, and he is soon on the road again, where he meets one of his biggest temptations.

Her name is Terry, and he meets her on the bus to LA. She is a Mexican who has run away from her husband. They spend “the next fifteen days…together for better or for worse.” Sal spends the better part of a week with Terry and her family in a migrant worker’s camp. The agrarian lifestyle initially appeals to Sal, and he says that he “thought [he] had found [his] life’s work.” The economic reality sets in and Sal begins to pray “to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people [he] loved.”

The next significant character that Sal meets is the “Ghost of the Susquehanna”. His role “is to complete the triad” (Goldstein) of symbolic structure in the narrative.

Sal’s continued journey on the road is entwined with the making of Dean as the epic hero: Dean Moriarty, the “son of a wino”. Dean has spent time in prison, for stealing cars. Sal discusses what effect this experience had on Dean saying, “only a guy who’s spent five years in jail can go to such maniacal helpless extremes.... Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.” Dean’s imprisonment, according to Sal, is when his heroic personality was solidified. Prison had the effect of fueling his obsession with the road. What makes him heroic to Sal is his free nature, and his reluctance to tie his spirit to social demands. This self-centered personality causes Dean to “[antagonize] people away from him by degrees.” The institution of marriage is particularly difficult for Dean, and by the end of the novel he is “three times married, twice divorced, and living with his second wife.” This decline of Dean makes up the second part of the novel, and culminates in the end of Sal’s journeys.

Sal’s travels erode into disappointment. He slowly becomes more dissatisfied with what he finds on the road, and he begins to look back on his previous travels in a more cynical way. His companions begin to be people from lower classes, old Negroes and Mexican whores. Back in Denver, and very alone, he speaks in verse saying, “Down in Denver, down in Denver/All I did was die.” We begin to confront the possibility that this journey and Sal’s hero Dean were both failures.

After reuniting with Dean, Sal begins to sense Dean’s decline and labels him “the HOLY GOOF”, when earlier he was called holy in a reverent tone. Dean’s abilities falter. When confronted with his abandonment of wife and child, he is silent. Sal explains, “where once Dean would have talked his way out, he now fell silent.... He was BEAT.”

Sal’s last attempt at finding an answer to his problems is a trip through the Mexican countryside to Mexico City with Dean and a hanger-on picked up in Denver. The travelers perk up as soon as they hit the Mexican border, and some of the novel's more memorable scenes depict their marijuana-fused introduction to Mexican culture, including a vivid (but expensive) sojurn to a bordello offering mambo music and underage prostitutes. (Indeed, throughout the book, both Sal and Dean betray a robust attraction to extremely young girls.)

Upon arriving in Mexico City, he immediately develops dysentery, and the final betrayal occurs when Dean leaves him behind, feverish and hallucinating. Sal reflects that “when I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes.”

The novel ends a year later in New York. Dean comes back to New York to see Sal and arrange for Sal and his girlfriend to migrate to San Francisco with him. The arrangements to move fall through and Dean returns to the West alone.

Sal closes the novel sitting on a pier during sunset, looking west. He reminisces on God, America, crying children, and the idea that "nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old," and ends with “I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."

Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: a link between the "beat generation" of the 1950s and the "hippies" of the 1960s.

Kenneth Elton Kesey (1935 –2001)

Kenneth Elton Kesey was an American author, best known for his novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and as a (counter) cultural figure who, some consider, was a link between the "beat generation" of the 1950s and the "hippies" of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie," Kesey said in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder.

Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado. Later he moved with his family to Springfield, Oregon. A champion wrestler in both high school and college, he eloped with his high-school sweetheart, Faye Haxby, between high school graduation and starting college at Oregon. They had three children, Jed, Zane, and Shannon. Kesey had another child, Sunshine, in 1966 with fellow Merry Prankster Carolyn Adams. Kesey attended the University of Oregon's School of Journalism, where he received a degree in speech and communication in 1957. He was awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship in 1958 to enroll in the creative writing program at Stanford University, which he did the following year. While at Stanford, he studied under Wallace Stegner and began the manuscript that would become One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

At Stanford in 1959, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study named Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital on the effects of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and DMT. Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the study and in years of private experimentation that followed. His role as a medical guinea pig inspired Kesey to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962. The success of this book, as well as the sale of his residence at Stanford, allowed him to move to La Honda, California, in the mountains south of San Francisco. He frequently entertained friends and many others with parties he called "Acid Tests" involving music (such as Kesey's favorite band, The Warlocks, later known as the Grateful Dead), black lights, fluorescent paint, strobes, and other "psychedelic" effects, and of course LSD. These parties were noted in some of Allen Ginsberg's poems and are also described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, as well as Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson.

Kesey was arrested for possession of marijuana in 1966. He looked for advice in a Ouija board, which told him to leave. In an attempt to mislead police, he faked suicide by having friends leave the Merry Pranksters' truck on a cliffside road near Eureka, along with a suicide note that said, "Ocean Ocean I'll beat you in the end." Kesey fled to Mexico in the back of a friend's car, an intentionally feeble attempt at disguise. When he later returned to the United States, Kesey was arrested and sent to jail for five months. On his release, he moved with his family back to the family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon in the Willamette Valley, where he was to spend the rest of his life. He wrote many articles, smaller books (mostly collections of his articles), and short stories during that time. In 1997, Kesey reunited with the Merry Pranksters at a Phish concert during a performance of the song "Colonel Forbin's Ascent." His last major work was an essay for Rolling Stone magazine calling for peace after 911.

Kesey died on November 10, 2001 following an operation for liver cancer. The operation was carried out by Dr. Amy DesRoches of Ontario, Canada, who was later sued for malpractice.