Author Jack Kerouac relaxes at a friend's home in Lowell, Massachusetts. *

Photo: AP/Stanley Twardowicz * Sal Paradise knew what it meant to be young, with no money in your pockets but no obligations either, completely at loose ends. It meant you were free. Even if you were also a bit lost.

Paradise is the autobiographical protagonist in On the Road, Jack Kerouac's exuberant, stream-of-consciousness novel that celebrates its 50th anniversary next week. With shiftless soulmate Dean Moriarty (based on Kerouac's own real-life pal Neal Cassady) leading the way, Paradise crisscrosses America on the ultimate road trip, a pursuit of enlightenment and kicks splashed across a canvas of easy sex and dago red nights with some poetry and bennies thrown in and a cool solo saxophone playing in the background.

On the Road has spoken to every generation since it appeared, and it's still got plenty to say in a society where consumer conformity is sold as rebellion by savvy marketers and the tyranny of the pop-culture machine smothers any truly iconoclastic voice.

Although not published until 1957, the book was set in the late '40s and written in the early '50s – then, as now, troubled, conflicted times in the United States. On the one hand, this country had emerged from World War II as its clearest winner. We were, by far, the richest, most powerful nation on earth.

But then the Russians got the bomb, and we all got scared. All those backyard bomb shelters aside, though, we had plenty of our own demons to deal with right here. The war may have established American hegemony, but it also shook the country's social structure to its core.

Women who had tasted the workplace for the first time were now sent home, as the men came back to reclaim their jobs. A lot of those gals didn't want to go, and a lot of the boys coming home decided that "home" wasn't necessarily where they wanted to be: Soldiers and sailors had discovered that an entire world existed outside the confines of their hometowns. Blacks who had left the largely rural South during the war, looking for work in northern factories and shipyards, found themselves marooned in urban ghettos, feared and despised.

A largely static, stifled prewar population had scattered to the four winds.

The '50s, to a large extent, were about the establishment trying to stuff the toothpaste back into the tube. In the end, it couldn't be done. The result was a creeping estrangement between the old order and a growing number of Americans who felt alienated in their own country.

The Beat movement was a conspicuous manifestation of this alienation, and if Allen Ginsberg was its literary heart, Kerouac was its soul. On the Road was – and remains today – an eloquent, if unpolished, anthem for the dispossessed, the outsider, the one who doesn't quite fit in.

Kerouac himself never fit in, although he spent a good part of his life trying to. He died young and unhappy, but to measure On the Road against the bitterness of its author's life is to miss the point. The novel is about the yearning for freedom. What you do with that freedom once you've attained it ... well, that's up to you. It was then. It is now.

Whether Kerouac was a "great" writer is certainly debatable (define "great," for starters); that he was one of America's most influential writers is beyond dispute. On the Road, at 50, sells more copies in a given year than most new fiction does, so it evidently still strikes a chord somewhere.

Kerouac gets kicked around pretty good in academia and by other writers, mostly East Coast snoots who wrinkle their noses at the idea of automatic writing. It was Truman Capote, remember, who dismissed Kerouac with one of the bitchiest literary putdowns of all time: "That's not writing, that's typing."

Without a doubt, writing on a scroll in a nonstop, three-week frenzy of Benzedrine-fueled inspiration doesn't represent the height of literary craft. But On the Road is a banshee cry for freedom, not pop literature, so in this case Kerouac's improvisation thoroughly guts Capote's measured prose.

While you're digesting that morsel, try this one: On the Road is as deserving of a place in the geek's literary canon as anything penned by Tolkien, Gibson or Dick. Kerouac didn't invent alien civilizations or futuristic worlds, but he helped break down the walls of convention in the real one. If the modern geek is the maverick he often claims to be, then he owes at least a cursory nod backward to a genuine maverick, one who helped pave the way while on a hopeless struggle to find himself.

Fifty years along, On the Road still resonates for those of us possessed of a restless spirit, who see gray conformity as spiritual death, who place the value of the individual above the mere possession of things. For us, Sal Paradise's odyssey stands as the antidote – and as a warning to keep a close watch on our souls.

- - -Tony Long is copy chief at Wired News.

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