Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was published 50 years ago this month.
The story of Sal Paradise, his friends Dean Moriarty and Carlo Marx and his road trip through America was an immediate literary success. It became a symbol of the Beat generation – spawning a social and cultural revolution.
But it appears that Kerouac, the quintessential American writer, thought of himself as profoundly French-Canadian. And it turns out, he even wrote the first 15 pages of his best-seller On the Road, in French.
Shelley Pomerance brings us this story from Montreal.
AP Photo/Stanley Twardowicz