The Beats vs the 1%

The Beats vs. the 1%

By Maud Newton (New York Times - Sunday Magazine)

Jack Karouac

Seventy years ago, Henry Miller traveled the U.S. after a decade abroad and wrote “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare” to excoriate the bourgeois complacency he saw. “That Roosevelt!” he recalls his dad’s New-Deal-averse neighbors complaining, “as if they were saying, ‘That Hitler!’ ” The book later influenced the Beats, Jack Kerouac especially. And in the 99-percent era, its provocations overshadow “On the Road.”

Henry Miller

"To live beyond the pale, to work for the pleasure of working, to grow old gracefully while retaining one’s faculties, one’s enthusiasms, one’s self-respect, one has to establish other values than those endorsed by the mob. It takes an artist to make this breach in the wall. An artist is primarily one who has faith in himself. He does not respond to the normal stimuli: he is neither a drudge nor a parasite. He lives to express himself and in so doing enriches the world." - Henry Miller

"On the Road" will soon be released as a movie:

“the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

― Jack Kerouac, On the Road