The Jack Kerouac Writer in Residence Project of Orlando offers free room and board to writers

An interactive Google map of Sal Paradise’s first trip in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The map connects with the Littourati blog. Traces the journey of the author with accompanying reflections and essays. Also links with information on each place the author visited or mentioned. Concept and design by Michael L. Hess.

The little brick house at 5169 10th Ave. N isn’t much to look at. But in 1969, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times walked past the palms and knocked on the door and found the grizzled jowls and red-rimmed eyes of the 46-year-old king of the Beats.

Jack Kerouac, author, artist, cult hero, was watching Walter Cronkite on the evening news, volume turned silent, while Handel’s Messiah blared from the record player. He was smoking Camels, drinking whiskey from a medicine vial and chasing it with Falstaff beer in a half-quart can.

“You better not try to take my photo, or I’ll kick your a—,” Kerouac said.

He’d been living in obscurity in St. Petersburg for several years with his third wife, Stella, and his mother, who was paralyzed. The man who had written 17 books, including On the Road and The Dharma Bums, was clearly fading.

He complained of making just $1,770 the first six months of the year. He complained that he was lonely and didn’t get out much. He complained that he was ill.

“I got a g—d—- hernia, you know that? My g—d—- belly-button is popping out. That’s why I’m dressed like this,” he said. “I got no place to go, anyway.”

He was dead from gastric hemorrhaging a few weeks later, at St. Anthony’s Hospital, where they tried to save him with 30 units of Type A Positive.

There’s not much left of Kerouac here, save some stories and old acquaintances and a favorite bar stool or two. And this house.

His mother died not long after Jack, and Stella passed in 1990, but the house has been mostly empty of humans since the ’70s. To walk inside is to be transported back 40 years. Tchotchkes from the era line the shelves. A ‘72 Chevy Caprice sits on flats in the two-car garage. A Reader’s Digest from September 1967 sits on the record cabinet. A 1969 telephone directory for Lowell, Mass., is shelved on Kerouac’s desk in the bedroom. A Boone’s Farm box is in a closet. An official mayoral proclamation for “Jack Kerouac Day” in Lowell, Mass., hangs on one wall, near a Buddha statue and a crucifix.

“This was Jack’s chair,” said Pat Barmore, a Kerouac fan who gave an impromptu tour Friday. Barmore graduated from Largo High School in 1969 and set off on a two-month road trip, thinking he would look up Kerouac when he got back. But Kerouac was dead by the time he returned.

Barmore is working with a few others to start a nonprofit called Friends of Jack Kerouac to raise money for repairs on the house. He first spoke to the home’s current owner, Kerouac’s brother-in-law John Sampas, to ask for permission to use Kerouac’s likeness on a poster and T-shirts for the Flamingo, on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street N, where Kerouac liked to drink and play pool.

A month ago, Barmore said, Sampas called him to report that someone had broken out a window. Sampas, who lives in Massachusetts, asked Barmore if he’d take care of the property.

“He said, ‘I’ll pay you,’ ” Barmore recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t think you’ll have to.’ “

Kerouac’s following, he said, is strong enough to fund the upkeep on the man’s last abode. The mailbox gives a hint that he might be right — it’s full of notes from fans.

“Dearest Jack,” reads one. “Thank you for everything. Your work is why I write, and write to live.”

“Hey Jack, We came by to say hello,” says another. “Sorry we missed you.”

Barmore and Pete Gallagher have been hosting Kerouac-themed concerts at the Flamingo to raise money. They’re throwing one tonight with a lineup of bands and some beat poetry.

They’ve bleached the toilets at the house and are trying to get rid of the rats. They need to replace a window and repair some furniture. They envision cleaning the place up, making it look like it did when Kerouac slept here. Then, who knows? Maybe it could be a writer’s residence. Maybe they could open it to the public a little bit, invite people in.

“I’m glad to see you,” Kerouac told the Times reporter in ‘69, “because I’m very lonesome here.”

It’s too late to give him company, but maybe it’s not too late for his place.

The Paris Review is a literary magazine featuring original writing, art, and in-depth interviews with famous writers.

Leaving the town, we were caught in a rainstorm and took a bus to Bath. Then, hitchhiking toward London, we were unsuccessful until Ginsberg tried using Buddhist hand signals instead of thumbing; half a minute later a car stopped. Riding through Somerset he talked about notation, the mode he says he learned from Kerouac and has used in composing his enormous journals; he read from an account he’d made of a recent meeting with the poets Yevtushenko and Voznesensky in Moscow, and then, looking up at a knot in a withered oak by the road, said, “The tree has cancer of the breast … that’s what I mean …”

Two weeks later he was in Cambridge for a reading and I asked him to submit to this interview. He was still busy with Blake, roaming and musing around the university and countryside in his spare moments; it took two days to get him to sit still long enough to turn on the tape recorder. He spoke slowly and thoughtfully, tiring after two hours. We stopped for a meal when guests came—when Ginsberg learned one of them was a biochemist he questioned him about viruses and DNA for an hour—then we returned to record the other half of the tape.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Interactive Google Maps to follow the four cross-counry trips taken by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road narrator, Sal Paradise, in 1947, 1949 and 1950

The Trips: 
On the Road is broken into five parts, but only the first four feature the extended road trips that the book is famous for. I’ve created interactive maps for each of the four road trips in the book.

1. Map One — Summer 1947: New York to San Francisco by way of Denver, and back again.
2. Map Two — Winter 1949: Rocky Mount NC to San Francisco by way of New Orleans
3. Map Three — Spring 1949: Denver to New York by way of San Francisco
4. Map Four — Spring 1950: New York to Mexico City by way of Denver

These are Google Maps and they are zoomable. Click on one of the placemarkers on the map to see a quotation from the book, zoom in it to see the location on the map. In many cases where the narrative wasn’t clear on a given place, I’ve had to approximate — apply a “best guess” solution to a given location. 
There is also a link on each map to allow you to view a larger size on the Google Maps site. 

The Cars: 
The automobile and other forms of motor-driven transit figured prominently in On the Road, as it did in Post-WWII America. But no one who has read the book can forget three vehicles that figured prominently in the story. These are the only three vehicles that are identified by make and year in the whole book, and there was a reason for that: The cars themselves became sort of minor characters during the course of the adventures. 

1949 Hudson 

In the second trip, starting actually at Xmas 1948, Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassidy) shows up at the house of the brother of Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac) in “Testament, Virginia” (really Rocky Mount, NC) in a brand new 1949 Hudson. This is the car in which they blast off to New Orleans and the West Coast, January 1949. 
Like all of Dean’s cars, this one really took a beating.1947 Cadillac Limousine 

In the third trip, Dean and Sal score a “driveaway” car at a travel agency in Denver, for delivery to a ritzy Lakeshore address in Chicago. Needless to say, the car is somewhat the worse for wear when it finally gets home.1937 Ford Sedan 

In the fourth trip, this is the rattletrap car that gets the boys to Mexico City. It also, offstage as it were, gets Dean back as far as Louisiana where it finally gives up the ghost.Bonus: 
1937 Greyhound Bus 

It always comes a surprise to readers who first read On the Road to learn that Sal Paradise spent hardly any time hitchhiking. When he couldn’t boost a ride with Dean, in the cars listed above, he was comfortable in taking the bus. He logged many more miles on Greyhound buses than he ever did beating his shoe leather hitchhiking.
This is an example of the buses that, while they were ten years old or more at the time, were still rolling on American highways in the late 40s and early 50s.

An interactive Google map of Sal Paradise’s first trip in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The map connects with the Littourati blog. Traces the journey of the author with accompanying reflections and essays. Also links with information on each place the author visited or mentioned. Concept and design by Michael L. Hess.

Surely most ardent readers of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road have tried to map Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty’s American journey. Above, partially alleviating your own need to take the pains of sketching out that great Beat journey yourself, we have a map drawn by the author himself.

Pulled from Kerouac’s diary, it traces the route of a hitchhiking trip of July through October 1948, which no doubt fueled the still-potent literary impact of his best-known book, which would see publication almost a decade later in 1957. Each stop has a label, from the iconic American metropolises of New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. to the less-known but no less evocative smaller towns like Des Moines, North Platte, Laramie, and Selma.

For a representation more strictly reflecting the fiction, see Michael J. Hess’ map of Paradise and Moriarty’s route across the country. It offers passages straight from Kerouac’s text about all the places they stopped briefly, stayed a while, or only mentioned, like Salt Lake City, “a city of sprinklers” at dawn; Flagstaff, whose “every bump, rise, and stretch mystified my longing”; Omaha, home to “the first cowboy I saw”; and the Indianapolis Paradise enters on a bus which has just “roared through Indiana cornfields.” Writer Dennis Mansker, on his own site, has created four separate interactive maps, each covering one of the novel’s parts. He also includes a rundown of the road story’s four major vehicles, including the 1949 Hudson seen just above. “This is the car in which they blast off to New Orleans and the West Coast, January 1949,” Mansker notes. “Like all of Dean’s cars, this one really took a beating.” But Dean’s cars just had to take it, since, as the band Guided by Voices once sang, “Kerouac Never Drove, So He Never Drove Alone.”