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In the late summer of 1777, anyone standing on the banks of the Gulf of Finland might have beheld a most spellbinding sight: a three-masted maritime marvel of polished wood and golden paint, its sails billowing in the northern wind. On the deck of the yacht, they might have spotted the lone figure of a woman, her eyes fixed on the course of the Neva river flowing towards St Petersburg. If they could have seen inside, they would have found contents as exotic as the ship’s story: a menagerie of animals, including small monkeys; an orchestra; two clergymen (a Catholic for the French crew and an Anglican who doubled up as publicist); a state room, a kitchen, a bathroom and decorative heaters, along with a priceless selection of silver, and art in a picture gallery. The beady-eyed might have caught the name of the ship on the side: the Duchess of Kingston.
AMY GOODMAN: Fifty years ago this week, Viking Press published Jack Kerouac’s novel
On the Road. The book was an immediate hit and remains one of the key works of the Beat Generation.
On the Road was a fictionalized account of Kerouac’s travels across the country in the late 1940s. He originally wrote the book over a three-week stretch in the early 1950s. Kerouac typed it on a scroll, single-spaced with no margins or paragraph breaks.
JACK KEROUAC: So Dean and I raced on to the East Coast. At one point we drove a 1947 Cadillac limousine across the state of Nebraska 110 miles an hour, beating hot-shot passenger trains and steel-wheel freights in one nervous, shuddering snap up of the gas. We told stories and zoomed East. There were hobos by the tracks, wino bottles, the moon shining on wood fires. There were white-faced cows out in the plains, dim as nuns. There was dawn, Iowa, Mississippi River at Davenport, Chicago by nightfall. “Ho, man,” said Dean to me as we stood in