On the Road
I love the freedom and excitement written in this book: the open road, the jazz, the late nights, every day as an adventure. This is a lifestyle I never could have lived (in my more nervous reality), but I have loved living it through Kerouac and the other beat writers I have been fascinated by, especially Neal Cassady who inspired many other works of literature and drove the Merry Pranksters bus.
So while visiting San Francisco, I had to visit the Beat Museum. I actually didn’t know this museum existed until I saw it listed on a Kerouac bookmark I picked up at the American Writers Museum, another great literary stop.
A second legendary attraction in San Francisco that had been calling to me for many years is the City Lights Bookstore, which comes up time and time again in the stories of beat culture and more recently in my Writer’s Almanac emails.
To visit these two places, which are just across the street from each other, I decided to ditch my family for an afternoon so I could take in the attractions by myself at my own pace and not have to hear any complaining. I will be writing another post on all the fun things we did as a family in San Francisco.
First, I visited the Beat Museum for $8, which is located within a bookstore. It is at 540 Broadway and is open daily from 10 a.m. – 7 p.m. Here is their website: http://www.kerouac.com/
The museum is mostly paintings, posters, and other items on the wall or in glass cabinets. Just a few example of the collection are an annotated copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, portraits of the most famous Beatniks with short bios, and a list of what books were on their bookshelves. (Kerouac was reading Joyce.) There is furniture of the time period but they admit it was not used by anyone famous.
I spent about 40 mins looking through these items. This is definitely a place you can visit alone as most of your time is spent reading. Most exciting to me was discovering two books by women in the era to add to my reading list:
One and Only: The Untold Story of On the Road
Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir
The museum empties back out into the bookstore where there is a bathtub of books as well as very friendly staff who helped me find the books I mentioned above.
I then crossed the street to check out the City Lights Bookstore, which was a meeting place and publisher for the beatniks.
City Lights was founded in 1955 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti who launched the store with the Pocket Poets Series.
This bookstore was actually much more crowded than the museum. I headed upstairs to the Beat Literature Section and took this beautiful “shelfie”:
If you are fascinated by the literature of this movement as I am, these two places are definitely worth a stop when you are in San Francisco.
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Two of my favorite landmarks as well. The Beat Museum was not around when I “discovered” CityLights quite by accident on a summer afternoon in 1993. Subsequent trips have not dulled the excitement. The folks in the Beat Museum are frequently chatty and quite knowledgeable, especially on the Beats. CityLights: I’ve had one conversation to date, so they are little reserved, but always nice. CityLights is also home to so many interesting events: Ralph Nader, Joyce Carol Oates, to name a few.
Thanks for sharing your experiences, Nandan.
I didn’t know about these places! Im glad I found this post, I’ll be adding these places to my bucket-list of places to see. I haven’t focused on the US a whole lot on my own blog, but I figured I should really start with Kerouac when I do.
I love your website & will be reading all of your posts! Thanks for stopping by mine!
Thanks! I hope you enjoy the posts! I’m always looking for places I should visit and books to read so leave suggestions if you have them!
Have you written about Dublin/Ulysses? That is on my list!!
No! I would love to go to Ireland though. So much literary history there!