Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac, Malcolm Cowley, and the difficult birth of "On the Road."

For "On the Road"’s author, it was a struggle to write, then a struggle to live with its fame. “My work is found, my life is lost,” he wrote.

"On the Road" is a sad and somewhat self-consciously lyrical story about loneliness, insecurity, and failure. It’s also a story about guys who want to be with other guys.

Digging down into the roots of white America’s infatuation with Black.

A kinetic slice of Americana so pure you can almost smell Kerouac’s invoked apple pie – or maybe it’s the faint stench of exhaust fumes.

Joyce Johnson on the friendship between two famous outsiders.

In the early twentieth century, America's literature seemed provincial until Malcolm Cowley championed writers like Kerouac and Faulkner as distinctly American.

A new book traces "the rise and fall of Pete Rose, and the last glory days of baseball."

Two differing explorations of post-WWII culture, politics, and ideals.

One of the country’s oldest fire lookouts was destroyed last year in the largest wildfire in California’s history. What else is being lost?

What did the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog stand for?

The dropout was not just a hippy-trippy hedonist but a paranoid soul, who feared brainwashing and societal control.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of American artists began to think of advertising and commercial imagery as the new avant-garde.

In ‘The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War,’ Louis Menand explores the poetry, music, painting, dance and film that emerged during the Cold War.

The polarized dialogue over Vietnam and the civil rights movement convinced Ginsberg that America was teetering on the precipice of a fall.

How America's persistent preference for brash boys over "sivilizing" women fueled the candidacy of Donald Trump.

LSD, ecstasy, and a blast of utopianism: How 1967’s “Summer of Love” all began.