[re On the Road, Jack Kerouac]

These innocents dash madly back and forth across the country, but they aren’t even very good at hitchhiking. Any self-respecting pickpocket has been further around the pot looking for the handle than they have been from home. They are hep — jazz excites them — but the lucid, orderly lyricism of Lester Young sounds “wild, crazy, frantic, man!” and in a neighborhood Negro club, full of ship scalers and lady welders relaxing on Saturday night, they behave as if they were witnessing a jungle orgy. On the other hand, they are not in revolt against the society which has produced them. Their talk is not of either the yogi or the commissar, but of corny entertainers, ham TV programs and the advertised virtues of the latest cars. Their values are those of the most conformist members of the middle class they despise, but enormously hypertrophied. They are demoralized and unsuccessful little Babbitts. This novel should demonstrate once and for all that the hipster is the furious square.