On the Road (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)

Because On the Road was published near the end of the 1950's, when the conformism of the Eisenhower era was at its most numbing, the book has generally been regarded as a forecast of the counterculture explosion of the next decade. While it certainly contributed to the developing sensibility of the generation that came of age in the 1960's, the book actually belongs to an earlier era in American life. Critics have pointed out how much Kerouac's sense of America is derived from the Transcendentalists of the previous century—writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David...

[The entire page is 1455 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass