On the Road, 50 ans après

Quelques aricles ont salué hier le cinquantième anniversaire de la “Beat Generation”, placé à la date symbolique de la publication d’un article enthousiaste de critique du New York Times de On the Road de Jack Kerouac, et de la mise en librairie du livre (tout cela, le 5 septembre 1957). En réalité, le premier article sur la “Beat Generation” date du 16 novembre 1952, de John Clellon Holmes dans le New York Times Magazine, et le texte de cet article est disponible en ligne, sur www.litkicks.com.

Un article de The Independent d’hier nous rappelle qu’il y a 50 ans,

»Just after midnight, […] Jack Kerouac and his girlfriend Joyce went out to buy a first edition of The New York Times to read its review of On the Road, his second novel.

»It has been called the most famous book review in the paper's history. With its publication, Kerouac, who arrived in town on a borrowed Greyhound bus fare, was catapulted to instant literary fame. He would never recover.

»“On the Road is the second novel by Jack Kerouac,” the reviewer Gilbert Millstein began, “and its publication is a historic occasion insofar as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment”.

»He wrote that On the Road was “the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat’, and whose principal avatar he is.” What The Sun Also Rises had been to the Lost Generation, said The New York Times, On the Road would become to the Beat Generation.»

Nos lecteurs peuvent évidemment retrouver, mise en ligne hier, notre interprétation de la “Beat Generation”et son importance fondamentale dans l’histoire des USA, à notre estime bien plus dans le domaine politique que dans le seul domaine de la contre-culture.

Aujourd’hui, il y a le souvenir de la ”Beat Generation” et, bien entendu, en plus, ou en prime c'es selon, l’industrie qui va avec.

«Today the scroll is in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac's home town. The former mill town has its own Kerouac park, where weeping willows surround granite columns with excerpts from On the Road and other less remembered works.

(…)

»These days there are not so many hitch-hikers following Kerouac's erratic footsteps, but the Kerouac industry is busy making money. A full Kerouac ensemble, complete with leather travel bag, can be purchased. Gap uses his name to sell jeans and six books have just been published about the writer.»

Mis en ligne le 6 septembre 2007 à 13H29