Happy 4th of July

Kerouac's hand-drawn cover for On The Road

It was but a scant 234 years ago that Thomas Jefferson made that famous and formal Declaration of Independence for the colonies that would soon become the United States. And like so many years past, we all celebrate that first act of rebellion that made us... well, us. While sometimes hyperbolic patriotism can trend on being silly, what is certainly not silly is that "idea" of America and that we are a country whose very existence is predicated on rebellion, which is a pretty cool thing when you think about it.

Anyways, I wanted to wish you all out there a happy Fourth of July and happy celebrating! Enjoy your BBQs and beer and fireworks and sunshine and baseball and whatever you may do to celebrate!

Now, you might be wondering: "Why did he post an On The Road-related picture in a post about the 4th of July?" Well on this day when we celebrate America I thought I should also point out one of my favorite aspects of America- our literary heritage. Just like the Founding Fathers who rebelled against the British government, our literary heros rebelled as well and created a literature that persists and is undeniably ours and undeniably American. While we should celebrate and remember the Founding Fathers- Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Adams (and those who weren't Founding Fathers but still remarkably important in our country's historical narrative- Lincoln, Roosevelt and Kennedy), we can also celebrate those writers who helped to shape that idea of America by creating a literary tradition that belonged to us and no one else. Writers like Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Wolfe, Faulkner, Fitzerland, Steinbeck, Hemingway and the author I always think of when I think of America and literature... Jack Kerouac.

(I know I'm forgetting some authors on this short list but those are some of my favorites and I know I could go on forever with this list. But I digress...)

On The Road is one of the greatest books about America and the beauty and wonder that can be found here and not anywhere else. Here's one of my favorite quotes from the novel about America, at least in some sense, and I'll leave you with that and wish you all a happy and wonderful Fourth of July!

"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future."