The book was a best-seller, and it made Jack Kerouac, who had worked on it for ten years, a celebrity. When “On the Road” came out, in September, 1957, it was praised in the New York Times as the novel of the Beat Generation, equivalent in stature and significance to “The Sun Also Rises,” the novel of the Lost Generation. The time of “Howl” and “On the Road” was also the time of “Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely” and the original “Ocean’s Eleven,” and although by many measures a taste for the product of North Beach is incompatible with a taste for the product of Las Vegas, the Beat Movement writers and the Rat Pack entertainers were shapers of a similar sensibility. It’s a sentiment that Frank Sinatra would have appreciated.
“The social organization which is most true of itself to the artist is the boy gang,” Allen Ginsberg once observed.
