On the Road with on the Road

A photographic accompaniment to On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

Robert Frank’s The Americans redefined photography in 1959 and inspired Carl Moore to hit the road with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Like Frank, Moore sought to reveal America to Americans--capturing the landscapes, faces, and fleeting moments that echo Kerouac’s metaphorical vision.

From Denver, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to a cross-country drive with his son from Santa Fe to New England, Moore retraces Sal Paradise’s footsteps with his Nikon in hand. The result is a vivid, contemporary counterpart to Kerouac’s masterpiece--where the photographs themselves feel restless, alive, and haunted by the same hunger for the open road.

As Jim Sampas notes in his Foreword, ＂It isn’t often that something comes in that excites me as much as this project.＂ These images remind us of the beauty and variety of human experience, the thrill of movement, and the quiet grace of stillness. Paired with passages from On the Road, they invite us to see Kerouac’s America anew--and to feel again the irresistible pull of the road.

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the ＂Beat generation＂ and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of ＂one vast book,＂ The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

Carl M. Moore is an emeritus professor, retired from Kent State University where he taught for 26 years. His university research and my work in the real world has been to figure out how to make it safe for people in groups to say what is on their minds. When that happens, good things get done.