Jack Kerouac’s On The Road Turned Into Google Driving Directions & Published as a Free eBook

in Literature, Maps | February 10th, 2014 6 Comments

A cou­ple weeks ago, Col­in Mar­shall high­light­ed for you Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Map of the Hitch­hik­ing Trip Nar­rat­ed in On the Road. Now we have anoth­er Ker­oua­cian map for you — a map for our times. Gre­gor Weich­brodt, a Ger­man col­lege stu­dent, took all of the geo­graph­ic stops men­tioned in On the Road, plugged them into Google Maps, and end­ed up with a 45-page man­u­al of dri­ving direc­tions, divid­ed into chap­ters par­al­lel­ing those of Ker­ouac’s orig­i­nal book. You can read the man­u­al — On the Road for 17,527 Miles– as a free ebook. Just click the image above to view it online (or click here). Like­wise, you can pur­chase a print copy on Lulu and per­haps make it the basis for your own road trip. Won­der­ing how long such a trip might take? Google Maps indi­cates that Ker­ouac’s jour­ney cov­ered some 17,527 miles and the­o­ret­i­cal­ly took some 272 hours.

Note: You can find lec­tures (1 + 2) dis­cussing the impor­tance of On the Road in Yale’s course, The Amer­i­can Nov­el Since 1945. It appears in the Lit­er­a­ture sec­tion of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack Ker­ouac Lists 9 Essen­tials for Writ­ing Spon­ta­neous Prose

Pull My Daisy: 1959 Beat­nik Film Stars Jack Ker­ouac and Allen Gins­berg

Jack Ker­ouac Reads from On the Road (1959)

500 Free eBooks: Down­load Great Books for Free


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Comments (6)
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  • Joshua Kupetz says:
    February 9, 2014 at 6:06 am

    Very inter­est­ing idea–too bad the author begins with the bus west instead of the actu­al begin­ning of the trip, which took him north to Bear Moun­tain in the rain–the loca­tion where Sal artic­u­lates the trav­el ethos of the nov­el (and Ker­ouac indi­cates his aes­thet­ic project).

    Reply
  • Linda says:
    February 11, 2014 at 4:06 am

    Wow! What a road trip this would make!

    Reply
  • William says:
    February 12, 2014 at 9:15 am

    To be more authen­tic, how­ev­er, you would have to avoid all inter­states as they would not have been around in the 40s.

    Reply
  • Derek says:
    February 19, 2014 at 7:40 am

    I appre­ci­ate all the work that went into this… but why not include *maps* of the route?

    Reply
  • Mike says:
    February 23, 2014 at 7:11 am

    I took this trip 5 years ago back in 2009, just after I grad­u­at­ed col­lege. I fol­lowed Ker­ouac’s route, stopped in every city, down, street cor­ner, and cow town men­tioned in the book, took a pic­ture, and includ­ed the rel­e­vant pas­sage. I had a blog about it, too, but that has since lapsed (as blog­ging endeav­ors usu­al­ly do). http://www.aroadvision.blogspot.com

    If I did­n’t already do this, I’d def­i­nite­ly check out this kid’s ebook, but I would­n’t fol­low it blind­ly; I’d fol­low the orig­i­nal work.

    Reply

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