Jack Kerouac And The Satori Highway

By Matt Miller

satori - Pronunciation:

(su-tr''E, -tOr''E),
n. Zen. sudden enlightenment.

In 1957, Jack Kerouac, a French Canadian kid from the mill-town of Lowell, Massachusetts, published his second novel, On the Road, and became an instant celebrity. The book would become a stone thrown into a cultural lake whose ripple would grow to Tsunami proportions and wash across the American landscape. Forty years after its publication, in the summer of 1997, my buddy Dave Robinson and I packed up all we knew of life in the back of a black Ford Bronco and left our hometown for the west dest...