Happy Birthday, Jack

Last week would have been Jack Kerouac's birthday.  I read "On The Road" many years ago and was a bit disappointed.  I just didn't see what the big deal was.  After listening to a radio program over the weekend I realized what the big deal was -- or more accurately -- why I didn't see the what the big deal was before.

The book "On The Road" was published before I was born, and it chronicled his doings from years before that -- life and road trips starting in the late 1940s and extending into the 1950s.  By the time I read this book much of that radicalism had been main-streamed into our lives.  Reading about Kerouac "living" the 1960's just didn't seem so cool when I read about it in the 1980's.  That is until I looked at it from the perspective of  post-war America in the 1940's and 50's, which is when he was actually doing it.