by It has been 68 years since Jack Kerouac’s On The Road was published – yet somehow that feels too recent.
It’s not that the content of the book is out of date, it’s simply the fact that the novel has entered the ether. It is an omnipresent piece of literature with an impact that is utterly immeasurable in its limitlessness. Art, film, music, literature, even general tourist culture; Kerouac’s presence is there.
On The Road is more of a phenomenon than anything. It’s become even a sort of caricature as ever since the book was released, it fostered a lifestyle. People wanted to be like Kerouac, worshipping him not so much as a literary icon, but a social and cultural one. He was a countercultural hero who also seemed to appeal to the American dream, and especially the American man longing for freedom and adventure.
For decades now, that has been unpacked. The text has been poured over, the movies have been made, the songs inspired by him have been sung. The name Jack Kerouac is wildly known and the title On The Road has been granted the badge of The great American novel. So what is there left to learn?
Or really, for a lot of people, why should we still care? While On The Road remains literarily important, the importance of its contents feels somewhat faded. The America of the Beat generation is very different now. The eyes of its public are more open, its politics is more divisive, its tensions seem higher. The perspective of a white man able to pick up, pack up and hit the road feels out of touch in this climate, so why should we care what Kerouac had to say?
Director Ebs Burnough asked that exactly question when he initially wanted to turn down the offer to make a Kerouac documentary in 2025. “I immediately said, ‘I’m not sure that I’m interested in doing anything on Jack Kerouac’,” he told Far Out as he felt the same modern fatigue with the figure that many might.
“I’d read Kerouac for the first time when I was about 16 in America, and so I had a very, rather specific idea in my mind as to who he was and what he stood for,” he added, admitting that the ‘who’ in his mind was not him.
“I didn’t come to it with the same hero worship, because certainly I hadn’t felt growing up like I could do what he’d done.”
Ebs Burnough
As a black man, realistically, it’s not. Looking back on Kerouac’s road mindset, it is a privileged one that could never have been afforded to people of colour or women or queer people, as Kerouac himself seemed to limit those undertones in his work. “I grew up in part in the American South, on the Florida, Georgia border, and for me, even as a child, when my mother and I would take road trips, I so often didn’t feel comfortable on them, because there were places where she would say, ‘Well, We’re not going to stop and get fuel here because of where we were, and there were large pockets of, you know, members of the KKK in that particular area’, or there was danger,” Burnough said. So while he revered Kerouac as a writer, there is a difference in his perspective on the text.
But that perspective sets him free; “There’s a lot of hero worship around him. I went in thinking, ‘Why?’”
Kerouac is more myth than man by this point. To the literary white boys looking for thrills, there is no greater hero, and they’ve been more than fed in terms of content surrounding the writer. Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation is not for them.
Instead, Burnough’s documentary follows a selection of real people in their own road stories. “What if we were talking about the people who couldn’t necessarily go on the road when Kerouac could back in 1957, and what did that look like?” the director explained. “I didn’t come to it with the same hero worship, because certainly I hadn’t felt growing up like I could do what he’d done,” so instead, he chose to tell the tale of the text through a cast of people also isolated from it, including a young black man moving to the south for university, and a single woman travelling solo as she attempts to reconnect with her family.
Yet in the process of making the movie, and in learning more about Kerouac and discovering the story again but through this inclusive lens, it changed Burnough’s feelings. It’s not that he forgave things as the documentary deals direct with the issues of misogyny and racism in the text, and deals direct with the way that Kerouac’s own privilege dominates modern America as it becomes darker and darker.
But as for the man behind it, the director said that by the end, he had more “200%” more tenderness towards the author. By the time they wrapped, Kerouac felt presently important again, and became a figure for 2025 to care about.
“More than anything in a post covid world, we have become increasingly siloed in our communication, in what we learn, in who we speak to, in who we’re with, and being on the road forced me to get out of my comfort zone and not just with myself,” Burnough said as he seemed to suddenly understand the whole mentality and benefit of the road mindset.
In fact, he wondered if that exactly mindset could now be a healing one. “You’re in an RV park in the middle of Texas, and literally, there would be two camper vans next to each other, and one would say, ‘Fuck Biden’, and the other one would say, ‘Fuck Trump’. And yet, you would see the people in those two camper vans interacting, and they would be communicating,” he said.
“There is a humanity that we are increasingly losing. No, not even at risk of losing – that we are losing,” Burnough added, seeing these interactions and communities on the road, that he saw during the making of this documentary, and that are captured in Kerouac’s text, as a beacon of hope for cross-boundary togetherness.
