An American born speaker would be great for this one :) thank you. Could you please pause between paragraphs.
You are going to make my day, for sure :)
Jack Kerouac lived a brief but full life. He was born in 1922 and died in 1969 at the age of only forty-seven.
He was born into a family with French-Canadian roots, and did not speak English until he was six years old. It
wasn’t long before he decided he wanted to be a writer. He started at the age of ten, writing a sports news sheet, and by eleven had written a complete novel.
By this time he had already decided he wanted to travel, and in writing On the Road he combined his desire to travel with his desire to write.
Despite writing some thirty published and unpublished books, including plays and poetry as well as novels, Kerouac never repeated the international success of On the Road.
On the Road, originally published in 1955, is about a writer named Sal Paradise (actually Kerouac) who meets and becomes obsessed with the character of Dean Moriarity. Dean is the fictional equivalent of Neal Cassady, a Beat icon who never published a word during his lifetime, but appears either as himself or is characterised in the literary works of John Clellon Holmes, Alan Ginsberg, Tom Wolfe, and is even memorialized in the music of The Grateful Dead. Sal spends the novel hitchhiking across America, joy riding with Dean to Mexico, and basically experiencing the freedom of being on the road in post war America. Perhaps his best novel, On the Road may soon be gracing the silver screen.
Jack Kerouac, thought of by many as the father of the beat movement, is considered one of the most influential American writers of the 20th Century. The innovator of what he called 'spontaneous bop prosody', his frenetic fast-paced writing seemed to embody the energy and spirit of the post WW2 youth. Kerouac wrote like a jazz musician plays: fast and free, paying no attention to the rules. His lack of proper punctuation and sentence structure once prompted Truman Capote to say of his work, 'That's not writing, that's typing.'
"If you ever plan to motor west
Travel my way, take the highway that’s the best
Get your kicks on Route 66"
The idea for Route 66 started in Oklahoma. Citizens there wanted to link their state with states to the east and west. By the 1920s, federal officials wanted to connect state roads to provide a shorter, faster way across the country. So a plan was developed to connect existing state roads into one long national highway.
United States Highway 66 was established on November 11th, 1926. It was one the first federal highways. It crossed eight states. It was 3,800 kilometers long.
Route 66 became the most famous road in America. It passed through the center of many cities and towns. It crossed deserts, mountains, valleys and rivers.
In the 1930s, people suffered through the Great Depression. In Oklahoma, many poor families lost their farms because of dust storms. So they traveled west to California on Route 66 in search of a better life.
In 1939, John Steinbeck wrote about these families in "The Grapes of Wrath."
Young writer Sal Paradise has his life shaken by the arrival of free-spirited Dean Moriarty and his girl, Marylou. As they travel across the country, they encounter a mix of people who each impact their journey indelibly.
Folks, if you're going to record this, you really have to sing the excerpt from Route 66 :D