It is a good thing that on the road exists, it tells a vivid truth about america that many millions have experienced but very few put down in words
My grandmother left NYC in 1929 with 3 other recently graduated nurses and drove a model A ford to california when there were still patches of prairy that had to be driven over, and in the 90's I drove there useing mostly back roads, bought a school bus in Vancouver for $50, and drove it back to Nova Scotia, though ended up chatting with Keasy at the country fair....got invited to the farm, but was in a hurry going south
got a copy of on the road in a cleminites box, with a stack of state maps from the time it was written that I found all perfectly
preserved in the rafters of my shop
I gather that the pre-freeway 1940s and 1950s were the great age for road trips in America -- for all kinds of people, including the very non-bohemian.
I read somewhere that the mathematician John von Neumann drove across the country over twenty times in the late 40s and early 50s -- between Princeton and Los Alamos, I would guess. I also read that in the late 40s some of Norbert Wiener's grad students drove from Boston to Mexico City for a cybernetics conference --- they were gone for months!
Earlier, in the 1930s, there was the migration of Oakies from the dust bowl to California, as described in The Grapes of Wrath, which, come to think of it, is another road novel.
In 1957 my family, a young couple with two little kids, moved from Wisconsin to Seattle, driving in our Plymouth station wagon, camping along the way. I was very young but I recall stopping for a flash flood, and another time we had to stop for a cattle drive that was crossing the highway, driven by actual cowboys on horseback! I remember it as one of the great adventures of my life.
Story idea: on one of his many cross-country drives to Los Alamos, von Neumann stops into a remote diner out West where he runs into ... Kerouac and the others on one of their On The Road journeys! They get to talking, and von Neumann tells them about game theory, quantum mechanics, and computers --- which they have never heard of before. Kerouac writes about the encounter in one of his early On The Road drafts but it is removed by the editors who worry they might get in trouble for revealing atomic secrets because von Neumann hinted at plans to build the H-bomb.
