Kerouac on the Steve Allen Show

One of my all-time favorite writers, Jack Kerouac, on the Steve Allen Show in 1959:



Kerouac was such a great influence to me because I read him during my own years of wandering aimlessly about, looking for some sort of revelation. My experience wasn't the excited utterance of On the Road — Kerouac criss-crossed the country as a vagabond several times before pounding the whole experience out on his typewriter in three weeks, single-spaced with no paragraphs, filling a one hundred twenty-foot scroll of papers taped together. No, it wasn't anything like that. But the spirit was there, and apparently it was always there I came to find out. It was there when I used to skip school at thirteen and hop the Metro bus from the suburbs of Colerain to downtown Cincinnati, hanging out in Over-the-Rhine and Washington Park, finding myself immersed in the hum and Tao of the ordinary people made extraordinary through powerful, real experiences. I didn't know it then, until I read Kerouac, but I was Beat a few generations late.

Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything;
somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.

-Jack Kerouac, On the Road

A more expanded example: