Thursday September 13, 2007

A little over a month ago the radio show Studio 360 came calling asking me and my wife Hillary Frank what we thought about Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” I had read it in high school, loved it, and never picked it up again. Hillary had never read it. We were a little afraid to join in all the 50th anniversary mythologizing about the book until we flipped through my old copy from high school. It had all of the notes and underlining I’d done when I read it at seventeen. At one point, teenage Jonathan actually stopped underling things, put an asterisk in the top left corner of a page and wrote, “three pages of pure beauty.” Uggh. I think that right there convinced us we had a story.

Tune into Studio 360 this weekend for the results. Listen via real radios or computer boxes. Or also right here using Studio 360’s handy flash player.

The images above are some my favorites from this page which collects the covers of many, many editions of “On the Road.”