Jack Kerouac’s On the Road from 1957 has become almost synonymous with the postwar Beat and counterculture movements that rejected the staid domesticity of the 1950s in search of freedom and alternative ways of life. Joseph Luzzi, professor of literature at Bard College, discusses how characters based on the writer William S. Burroughs, the poet Allen Ginsberg, and Kerouac himself embraced new cultural forms like jazz and experimental literature in search of meaning and artistic freedom. He also explores how “the road” itself becomes a symbol of the quest for new ways of living, thinking, and feeling.
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