Episode Details

Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road and became the reluctant godfather of the counterculture. By the 1960s, he was a conservative Catholic who despised the hippies, loathed the antiwar movement, and drank himself to death at 47.

This episode traces the arc from his spontaneous prose breakthrough to his bitter final years, examining how the man who defined a generation ended up rejecting everything it stood for.

• How he typed On the Road on a continuous scroll in three weeks
• His complicated friendship with Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady
• The conservative politics that alienated him from the counterculture
• Why his literary reputation collapsed and then slowly recovered