Kerouac, the king of the Beats, nicely embodied a couple of recurrent themes in this history—mythologizing the good old days, living life as if it were a piece of fiction. “Nostalgia,” the Harvard cultural historian Louis Menand has written of On the Road, was “part of its appeal in 1957. For it is not a book about the nineteen-fifties. It’s a book about the nineteen-forties,” the “dying…world of hoboes and migrant workers and cowboys and crazy joyriders.” What’s more, the novel was not a fictionalization of adventures Kerouac just happened to experience—rather, “the trips in On the Road were
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