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tradition of American ingenuity. Jack London, whose travelogue The Road (1907) was of incalculable importance to Kerouac, thought it was his own early life as a mendicant hobo, compelled to improvise a story from what he saw on “the face of the person who opened the door,” that had made him a writer. Sometimes, most notably during the Depression, the hobo served as a reminder that anyone caught in an economic system rigged to deliver profits largely to the powerful could fall between the cracks; in 1933, FDR installed a federal program to aid “transients,” whose poverty was now considered neither their fault nor their choice. But once World War II had jump-started the economy, the pendulum swung back the other way. New York cracked down on chronic drunkards in public places; the nation’s Skid Rows, where Kerouac had often found lodgings and friends in his cross-country journeys, would soon be tagged “blighted areas” ripe for “urban renewal.” In San Francisco by 1956, cops were stopping Kerouac and his friends simply for walking on the streets late at night or loitering on corners to talk in the daytime. Systematic police raids plagued North Beach, the city’s bohemian quarter; Neal Cassady, entrapped by an undercover agent, was arrested for drug trafficking in 1958 and spent two years in San Quentin. By then Kerouac had returned east for good.

In The Dharma Bums, Ray wants nothing to do with “Japhy’s ideas about society.” His plan is to just “avoid it altogether, walk around it,” but that proves harder to do than he expects; cops are as plentiful here as in a Chaplin movie. Hitching his way west, Ray learns that it’s illegal for him to camp out anywhere within or near a town. Border patrolmen, even the rangers he joins at Desolation Peak, observe rules just as narrow and expect him to, while uranium prospectors looking to make a buck out of the United States’ ballooning nuclear weapons program comb the apparently unspoiled northwest. The fat, maliciously grinning cowboy in a gravel truck who deliberately tries to run over Ray’s backpack in northern California anticipates the vigilantes of Easy Rider (1969), and Cody’s girlfriend, Rosie (drawn directly from Natalie Jackson, Cassady’s real-life lover), an artist’s model and “a real gone chick,” rapidly turns into a proto-sixties burnout, skeletal and deranged, raving about an imminent “big new revolution of police”—“they’ll have everybody in jail!” Before she commits suicide, Ray tries to tell her that all of life is “just a dream,” that a “rucksack revolution” is coming instead, but she doesn’t believe him, and she almost, he admits, convinces him.

By the time he wrote his essay on the American hobo for Holiday, Kerouac had joined Rosie’s camp. The “thousand and one hiding places of industrial night” are being boarded up; cops in five-thousand-dollar patrol cars “pick on the first human being they see…anything that seems to be moving independently of gasoline, power, Army, or police.” Kerouac’s heart is with the homeless, the people outside the new nuclear family and the state that rewards and patrols it, but most of America is sitting home “watching the cop heroes on TV”; Dragnet, a huge hit, had just ended its eight-year run, and Naked City, another police series, stayed on the air until 1963. Even in the wilderness places he and Snyder had explored together, Kerouac notes, there’s always a helicopter “snooping around.” It’s bad enough that the tramp is all but obsolete—the hobo never lived who could snag a free ride atop a jet—he’s pathologized too, as a “rapist,…strangler, child-eater.” Kerouac went off the road, he announces, for good in 1956, the year Snyder left the United States. “The only thing to do [now] is to sit alone in a room and get drunk.” Bordering Kerouac’s essay on Holiday’s pages are ads for “Comfy Slippers” and packaged tours of Scandinavia. Of course, even as Kerouac wrote, the rucksack revolution he had predicted in The Dharma Bums was in the wings; public camping sites and hippie communes would soon dot the landscape. But there was one thing Kerouac