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Hey Jack KerouacWhy did sales of On the Road explode?

By Eliza TruittPosted Friday, March 30, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET

Last week's New York Times article on the auction of Jack Kerouac's scroll manuscript of On the Road included this puzzling tidbit:

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The book … continues to sell at a rate of 110,000 to 130,000 copies a year, a pace that has increased slightly since 1991, when steady annual sales of 25,000 quadrupled in one year.

Why this sudden and significant increase, and why in 1991? A general upsurge of interest in Beat literature? Did college and high-school courses begin teaching the book all at once?

Paul Slovak, associate publisher of Viking, had a few ideas: "[W]hen I presented these numbers at a panel I was on at the Kerouac conference two years ago, Robert Creeley suggested that part of it had to do with the end of the Reagan era (1992) and a loosening up of attitudes, a more liberal feeling in the country," he wrote me in an e-mail. Dan Lundy, vice president and director of academic marketing for Penguin Putnam attributed it to: "an upsurge of academic conferences, Doug Brinkley's roving bus of kids course, and Abercrombie & Fitch [had] very slick catalogs showing the books as fashion accessories." But Brinkley's bus tour, a six-week road trip across America spent "reading, meeting cultural heroes, and experiencing the country," didn't take place until 1992 and wasn't widely known until he described it in the 1993 book The Majic Bus: An American Odyssey. Abercrombie & Fitch confirmed they used the book as a prop, but not until their 1997 back-to-school catalog.

Slovak recalled a show on the Beats at the Whitney in 1995 and noted that in the mid-'90s, Penguin published The Portable Jack Kerouac, a sampling of his work with an introduction by Ann Charters as well as his collected letters. Also around that time, movie stars Johnny Depp and Matt Dillon were making public their obsessions with the Beats, and both were rumored to be gunning for the role of Jack in a film version of On the Road that never made it into production. Slovak also speculated that "writers go in and out of fashion," and in the mid-'80s, when Kerouac's sales were slipping sometimes well below 10,000 copies a year, it was because the images of Kerouac's pathetic alcoholic decline were fresh in readers' minds; he had become a comic figure instead of a romantic one.

Ann Douglas, who teaches a course on Beat literature at Columbia, said the number of students signing up for her class doubled in the early '90s, and she confirmed that there was a surge of academic conferences about Kerouac and the Beats around the same time—but she remembered them as starting in '93 and '94. She suggested that the poetry slam fad that started in the early '90s could have contributed, as well as the explosion of interest in queer studies. (Though Kerouac wasn't openly gay like Allen Ginsberg, there was much speculation about his sexuality.) Douglas also claims that the revival began earlier in the academic world—in the late '70s. This revival "percolated through the '80s" and finally spread to the nonacademic community in the 1990s, when Kerouac's anti-materialistic message rang a chord with the general populace.

While all of these theories seemed plausible, none was a clincher. So I called my friend Ted Widmer, a former Clinton speech writer currently teaching history at Washington College who is a Kerouac fan. He recalled that through the '70s and '80s, the cover of the book was always ugly (Click here and here [scroll down] for examples), but that an edition with a fantastic cover had been published in the early 1990s. I found the cover he was talking about: A striking, iconic, black-and-white photo of Kerouac with Neal Cassady covers the whole front, with the title in small type toward the bottom. (Click here to look at it.) I called Penguin to find out when it was released. You guessed it: 1991.

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Eliza Truitt, a former editor at Slate, now works as a wedding photographer in Seattle.

COMMENTS

Reader Comments From The Fray:

[Notes from the Fray Editor: Todd Ritter wants to know more about how cover art affects sales, and we think it would be nice to hear Fray suggestions for book/art combinations which might demonstrate this. Another reader says "Woe to them who spit in the face of the Beats. The wind will blow it back"--this may have been aimed at other posters, we're not sure. The Wandering Void got into the spirit of things nicely, below, and generated a most interesting thread, with revelations about him(?)self and why he chose that great Frayname…]

Another reason for the steep upwards curve of Kerouac's popularity (or at least sales) is surely hinted at in the headline--"Hey Jack Kerouac". That's the title of a Ten Thousand Maniacs song which was around in the late 1980s. Someone else can surely give me a precise date, but I recall my then teenage daughter playing the album a lot, and then hunting for a copy of On the Road (even then, she liked to think of herself as ahead of the trends). This was in suburban London, where Natalie Merchant fans were thin on the ground--how much more influential was the song likely to be in the U.S.?

--John D

(To reply, click here.)

On the Interstate to find Franchiseville:
Romantic notions of discovering the real America, and in the process discovering the real you.... Try that today and here's what you get: Long, boring, well engineered roads with lots of fast, late model vehicles doing the same thing as you--just trying to get through to their destination. All the stops have the same generic national-level chain businesses. The same restaurants, gas stations, motels.
If you try to avoid that by taking the two-laners, you still pretty much get the same thing, only you will be seeing an array of dead and dying towns.
Where's the real America?
It's inside your TV set.
It's downloaded in your computer.
It's inside the gates of Disneyland.
Inside the walls of Vegas Casinos.

Stay home, save gas. It's better.

--The Wandering Void

(To reply, click here.)

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