Kerouac wrote On the Road, and it made him famous, and the fame ate him alive. By 1960, he was 38, drinking himself apart, with strangers showing up at his mother’s house wanting the King of the Beats. Ferlinghetti offered him a cabin in Bixby Canyon to dry out in, and this is that. He goes down there, and for about three days the creek and the fog and the redwoods do exactly what he hoped. Then the solitude turns on him. He runs back to San Francisco, drinks, picks up with Cassady’s girlfriend, comes back to the canyon with a crowd, and finally comes apart in the dark with the surf pounding and his mind going. He wrote it in ten nights on a roll of teletype paper. It’s the least romantic thing he did, and maybe the truest.
Big Sur