12.8.07

Kerouac, Fifty Years On

Here's the answer . . .



to this question:

For many young people in America, though, the name Jack Kerouac means nothing at all. In an age where youth culture is increasingly defined by consumerism, where the road trip has been replaced by the gap year, and where it is considered radical to be cool but not cool to be radical, whither Jack Kerouac and his beatific vision?

1 comment:

Cup said...

I'm crushed that today's kids will know Kerouac mainly as a khaki model.

My nephew — up until six months ago a happy-go-lucky kid, now a very depressed sixteen year old — kept quizzing me last weekend about Catcher in the Rye. He didn't get it. He couldn't understand Holden ... and yet he is Holden.