A Great Strange Dream

Vivian Gornick is a legend in NYC writing circles, having published numerous memories and books of essays about her life and times -- coming of age during the eras of Civil Rights, the Women's Movement, Vietnam, Stagflation, and many other such delights. She blazed the trail in crafting "the confessional" long before it became a mainstay of the publishing world.

She was also a reporter, who wrote for the Village Voice from 1969 to 1977.

In late October 1969 Gornick went to Jack Kerouac's funeral up in Massachusetts. The already-legendary Beat writer, scribe of the classic On the Road, had recently died from alcoholism at the age of 47. Gornick reported on it, seeing people like Alan Ginsberg and Jimmy Breslin there, and there was definitely a sense at this funeral that only had a man but an entire way of life had passed with him. By 1969, the Jazz loving, "hip-cat, groovy man", scatting don't-have-a-care-in-the-world world of the Beat generation had already become passe; now was the time of the Hippy, the protester -- and, more ominously, the Silent Majority. 

I'm a huge fan of Kerouac's work, so much so that I even wrote a novel in the vein of On the Road. For me, Kerouac was about freedom, about the wildness of America, about celebrating everything great about being alive and about America.

Right now we're living in another dark time, at a time when it's easy to be scared about the possibility of the American idea. A lot of people aren't happy (and you can include me, mostly, amongst them). But Kerouac had an answer for that, of sorts, probably knowing that his death was imminent and his life a short one: "Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream."