On the Road

In one of the most famous, free-flowing and deceptively careless paragraphs in his second novel, On The Road (1957), Jack Kerouac (1922–69) writes with disarming honesty about his relationship with ‘Dean Moriarty’ (Neal Cassady) and ‘Carlo Marx’ (Allen Ginsberg), each of whom would later become, like Kerouac himself, central figures in the mythology of the ‘Beat Generation’: