Monday’s Margins: Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac

Today would have been Jack Kerouac's 90th birthday.

- Kerouac’s only full-length play, "Beat Generation," will be staged for the first time this fall.

- He told the Paris Review: "I got the idea for the spontaneous style of On the Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady wrote his letters to me, all first person, fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed, with real names in his case, however (being letters). I remembered also Goethe's admonition, well Goethe's prophecy that the future literature of the West would be confessional in nature..."

- "Anyway, I wrote the book because we're all gonna die."

- A movie of On the Road starring Steve Buscemi, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams and Kristen Stewart will be released in 2012.

- You can apply to be a writer-in-Kerouac's-old-Orlando-residence as part of the Kerouac Project.

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