ABSTRACT. While writing On the Road, Jack Kerouac was already deep into Beat subculture, with its outstanding markers: dark glasses, berets, goatees, bebop jazz and drug use. His drug of choice was Benzedrine, which helped fuel his creativity to such an extent that this testament of the Beat movement supposedly came out of a three-week burst of writing. The first half of his career was then spent to get it published, the rest of his life was spent to live it down, with binge drinking or drinking to no end, until his biological demise and, to be sure, his cognitive deterioration were complete. We will follow closely all of this dysphoric fall, all the while attended by his loving, often smothering, mother, and her herd of cats.
Keywords: Jack Kerouac; beat; Benzedrine; alcohol consumption; dysphoric fall; smothering mother