A couple years ago, I managed to see Jack Kerouac’s original scroll on display at the New York Public Library, famously typed without paragraph breaks. Laid out horizontally, the physicality of Kerouac’s project becomes readily apparent—the action of literally laying out a road of text.

Luc Sante wrote for the New York Times in 2007 that On The Road portrays a series of ‘trips’ rather than ‘travels,’ as they deal primarily with ‘covering ground.’ Indeed, whether it’s ground or paper, Kerouac seems more concerned with the nature of journey than the destination—which makes him a “travel writer” in an unusually literal sense of the term.

When On The Road was finally published in 1957 it was an overnight success even though the literary world refused to treat Kerouac as a serious writer. Nowadays the novel is heralded by many as one of the great works of American prose—although it still has its critics.

Today the words “beat” and “beatnik” are largely confused and clouded in commercial nostalgia. The exploits of protagonists Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty still seem wild and fun, but what was decidedly counter-culture at the time has now been mostly subsumed into the main stream. Personally, I do not share in the same sort of post-war disillusionment as Kerouac’s characters, a reactionary sentiment that must have jived with many young people in the late ‘50’s.

And yet, despite the radically different political environment, the novel remains popular and relevant, especially to the younger generations.

One of the ways that On The Road endures is in its portrayal of the ethos of travel. Of course, this is a project in no way unique to Kerouac. The travel bug, so to speak, is a ubiquitous and well-traversed theme in American literature and folklore. Huck Finn’s trip down the Mississippi is the quintessential invocation of the desire to leave the home on a quest, but there are many others. Perhaps most relevant is the influence of Whitman, especially his iconic “Song of the Open Road” wherein he entreats the reader to travel, “loos’d of all limits,” never stopping, never tiring.

Kerouac’s own rapturous descriptions of racing 90-miles-an-hour through Nebraska more than echo this attitude. As Joyce Johnson said in a letter to Kerouac, On The Road was written with “the same power and freedom that Dean Moriarty drives a car.” Kerouac’s prose is filled with action and a dizzying sense of momentum. He doesn’t pause much between each description and evocation; rather, sights, sounds, people, places, and ideas cascade one after another down the page in an ecstatic embodiment of rushing around. Here’s a good example:

“How that truck disposed of the Nebraska nub—the nub that sticks out over Colorado! And soon I realized I was actually at last over Colorado, though not officially in it, but looking southwest toward Denver itself a few hundred miles away. I yelled for joy. We passed the bottle. The great blazing stars came out, the far-receding sand hills got dim. I felt like an arrow that could shoot out all the way.”

Kerouac’s road, far from lonesome, is one of great opportunity for human connection. As Jean-Christophe Cloutier, a graduate in the English department, remarked, one of the admirable aspects of On The Road is the way in which, after long journeys cross-country, the characters manage to run into each other again and again without cell phones, the internet, or really much communication at all.

Sal and Dean, the protagonists, are obsessed with really “digging” a place and meeting its “real” inhabitants, which for them means the local, the poor, and the minority. At the same time, Sal fosters a strong distain for “tourists,” leaving one to wonder exactly where he sees himself fitting in.

Anthropology Professor Ryan Chaney, who does his research in part on tourism in Appalachia (and coincidentally happens to be teaching a class called “Anthropology of The Road”), suggests that this assumption of tourism as the definition of inauthenticity “hinges on a position of class and racial privilege.” Indeed, Kerouac was Ivy-League educated and this background gives him and his characters a certain amount of freedom.

But on the other hand, as Cloutier pointed out, Kerouac was himself a minority in America—French Canadian—and one can see elements of his conflicted feelings of identification manifested in Sal himself, who is “white” but Italian and therefore “different.”

Rather than writing off the Kerouac’s treatment of authenticity as simplistic, I would argue that he directly engages the problem of travel, acknowledging the ultimate futility of Sal’s pursuit while remaining hopeful that in its repetition, some sort of meaning will be found. We can, at the very least, admire Kerouac for his grappling with the perspective of the traveler—for at some point we all experience the feeling of being an outsider, wanting to get a piece of the “real” thing.

More than ever, our generation faces the problem of how to properly interpret our experience of travel. Even though far away places are (for the privileged) comparatively closer today than ever before—what with the blossoming of the internet and the prevalence of study-abroad programs all over the world—the need is simultaneously greater for the development of a literature that captures the essence of travel in the twenty-first century. In this way, much can be gleaned from Kerouac, who treats the experience and interpretation of travel as one continuous narrative in a formally creative way.