More than fifteen years after its publication, On the Road still has a large and growing audience. For many, it was the book that most motivated dissatisfaction with the atmosphere of unquestioning acceptance that stifled the fifties; remarkably, despite the passage of time and its relative unpopularity among older university instructors, its audience grows, and young people especially gravitate to a force in it that seems to be propelled by the material itself, almost as if its author did not exist as an outside agency of creation.

On the Road was unprecedented both formally and thematically, but most of all in depicting an underground subculture that departed entirely from the dominant middle-class mores of the fifties, and instead offered as an ideal the sense of release and joy experienced by the less materially privileged segments of the society. Part of the genius of Kerouac's art was his ability...