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.”
