Ask people to name the book that captured the American highway, and many will say On the Road. Point out that it isn’t really about Route 66, and you’ll get an argument. Both things are true.
Jack Kerouac wrote it in a furious burst in April 1951, feeding a continuous roll of paper into his typewriter so he would never have to stop to change a page — a scroll that unspooled to roughly 120 feet. He had been making cross-country trips for years with his friend Neal Cassady, and he poured them onto that scroll as Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, two men chasing something they could never quite name across a restless postwar country.
The journeys in the book mostly follow other highways — US routes east and west, hitchhiked rides, Cassady’s borrowed cars — not the Chicago-to-LA line of Route 66. But that hardly matters, because what Kerouac captured wasn’t a road. It was the feeling of the road: the all-night driving, the jazz and the cheap diners, the conviction that the answer was always in the next town.
Viking finally published it in 1957, six years after that manic stretch at the typewriter. It became the sacred text of the Beats and, later, of everyone who ever pointed a car at the horizon just to see what was out there — Route 66 included.
The road in the mind is always longer than any road on the map.
We are offering licences for ROUTE 66® Beer in specific territories. An invitation to others to become part of this story. To carry a piece of the road with them and to contribute to the story. We will share a percentage of royalties with Route 66 associations to keep the story alive.
The journey continues. This story is brought to you by ROUTE 66® BEER. Find us at ROUTE66BEER.COM
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