h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

When Beat writer Jack Kerouac was staying with the Neal Cassady's in mid-1950, he was in the middle of writing a novel. It was a book that he would attempt to write three times before being satisfied with the effort. Although Neal loved the work in progress, which was an account of their adventures traveling cross country, his wife Carolyn was less enthusiastic; the memory of how angry she had been when Neal departed for these trips was still an open wound, and she feared that the book would become “an interminable highway.” Ironically, when it was finally published, Jack gave it a name suggestive of that and the subject content: On the Road.
On the Road was a book that gave Neal’s character, whom Kerouac labeled “Dean Moriarty,” as the consummate American man; the new generation of youth in America. Jack himself was called “Sal Paradise,” who was the narrator and observer of Moriarty’s mad tactics. “The only people for me,” he wrote, “are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved…” and he hooked up with Dean accordingly. Neal had fascinated Jack from the get-go and the book was a tribute to him as well as the lifestyle of the day. Reading On the Road was, for Jack’s friends, sometimes too close for comfort as he wrote about almost all of them with little departure from the sometimes painful truth.
If On the Road was a labor of love, then the love of the pen must have been real to Jack. He worked for this novel, and when one looks at the process toward its completion, it shows.
The first attempt at the book was in 1949, fresh from the adventure itself. Jack wrote anything and everything in it, and the chronicle became more and more complex. 500 words a day (which was Kerouac’s average rate) added thoroughness, but the details and extra abstracted words muddied up his thoughts. Soon, the account had become so heavy with prose and literary devices that it no longer made sense.
Dejected and recognizing the weight that had sunk the novel, Jack set it aside and thought little about it until 1951. The inspiration to take it up again came in the form of John Clellon Holmes, a writer and sometime friend of the group. Although he had watched from a distance to record the goings-on of Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg, and Herbert Hunke, Holmes had managed to capture their lives with clarity and faithful truth in his new, and as yet unpublished novel, The Beat Generation (published in 1952 as Go). Kerouac’s mind drifted to On the Road, and he told Holmes that he was going to write it as it occurred; that is, as fast as he could. “The hell with these phony architectures,” he said to Holmes.
It was during that brief period in Jack’s life when he was married to Joan Volmer that he began the “scroll version” of the book. True to his word, he wrote without interruption, dosed out on Benzedrine and living on a diet of coffee, pea soup, and cigarettes. He taped together tracing paper (rumored to have originated in the press room where Lucien Carr worked) so he could write without having to stop to replace the paper in the typewriter. He didn’t stop to sleep, shower, or go out, and his wife slept behind a screen to avoid the light of the desk lamp. On April 20th he had a nearly finished 120-yard novel that contained 186,000 words and three weeks of his life. With a feeling of shock and relief, he rolled the scroll out on the floor. “It looks like a road,” he remarked in a letter to Neal.
Immediately upon starting the novel, Jack ran into the problem of the protagonist. He was wavering between a character based on himself, to be named Ray Smith, and a character based on Neal, called “Red” Moultrie. But as Jack wrote, the truth of the situation came through the writing, and the characters put themselves into their proper places: Red Moultrie was the main character, the frantic, excitable young man from the west, settled into the forefront, and Ray Smith, like the reality of Jack’s self, was the beholder, following Red around the country as he searched for the truth.
On the Road was actually a story of four different trips, each more outrageous than the last. The major areas in the book are Denver (where Cassady was from), New York (the center of the Beat universe), San Francisco (perpetually the bohemian headquarters of the country), and Mexico, whose lazy manner and casual, accepting pace called often to Jack and Neal.