On the Road - Again Trivia Quiz

Answer: Lowell, Massachusetts

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. Lowell was a mill town along the Merrimack River which runs through New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The large woolen mills drew thousands of French-Canadian workers to the region in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Kerouac didn't learn to speak English until he was 6 years old. It is still common to hear Canadian French spoken in parts of the region.

After attending Columbia University in New York City and then dropping out, Kerouac worked as a merchant seaman, then returned to New York with the intention of becoming a writer. Talks with people outside the mainstream of American life convinced him that he must witness events firsthand rather than imagining them. The straight-laced mood of America was beginning to change and Kerouac would find himself as one of the new lifestyle's leaders, though he really didn't want to be.

Answer: Neal Cassady

Dean Moriarty was modeled after Neal Cassady, whom Kerouac met in New York City. Cassady was a writer who never had a book published until years after his death. His free-flowing letter writing style inspired Kerouac to develop a stream-of-consciousness style of writing.

The characters in the novel went on the road believing that in doing so they would find "the pearl", the meaning of existence. Hailed as one of the architects of the Beat Generation, Cassady traveled frequently with Kerouac and then became a father-figure of sorts to the psychedelic era of the 1960s.

Answer: Francis Ford Coppola

It was Francis Ford Coppola who ended up taking decades to make the movie version of "On the Road". Several screenwriters were hired over the years and even Coppola and his son tried writing a script for it. Several actors were approached, including Brad Pitt and Ethan Hawke, who weren't interested in the project. Financing eventually became an issue and finally, in 2010, with money from companies in four countries, the movie got its start. It was budgeted for $25 million, received mixed reviews and has significantly underperformed at the box office.

Coppola has been a very successful film director and producer and winner of six Academy Awards. His film list includes "Patton", the "The Godfather" series, "Apocalypse Now" and "Peggy Sue Got Married". Perhaps the karma wasn't just right when it came to making a fast project of "On the Road".

Answer: Naked Lunch

Meeting Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and others in the mid-1940s, William S. Burroughs became one of the founders of the Beat Generation and was revered by the 1960s counterculture. Burroughs struggled most of his life with a heroin addiction. Like Kerouac and some others, the heavy drug and sexual content of his works kept some of them from being published immediately. Indeed, "Queer", with heavy homosexual content, was written between 1951 and 1953 but not published until 1985.

Burroughs was the inspiration for the character Old Bull Lee in "On the Road". Viggo Mortensen played him in the movie. In a 1949 trip in the book, Sal and Dean go to see the morphine-addicted Lee and his wife Jane in Algiers, Louisiana, close to New Orleans while on their way to San Francisco, California. Though no major event happened in this vignette, it was part of Kerouac's 'spontaneous' style.

Answer: homeless

Dean's alcoholic father had left the family years before in Colorado. Dean and Sal looked for him on Detroit's Skid Row but couldn't find him. They returned to New York, stayed with Sal's aunt and partied in the city until Dean met a woman and got her pregnant while his wife was expecting their second child. At that point Sal's affection for Dean begins to crack.

A trip on the road, getting away from one's problems rather than confronting them is an underlying but largely unspoken theme in "On the Road". It was a strike against conventional mores, a chance to engage in risky behavior and avoid the consequences and one of the reasons the book has always had its detractors.

Answer: Kristen Stewart

Kristen Stewart, winner of several awards for her acting in "The Twilight Saga" played the role of Marylou, Moriarty's wife, then his ex-wife, then his lover, then not. He didn't care much what man she was with. "Dean will leave you out in the cold anytime it is in the interest of him," Marylou told Sal at one point. One critic said Stewart completed an "awkward threesome".

Kerouac had some strong sexual passages in "On the Road", both hetero- and homosexual. His publisher forced him to eliminate or change some of the passages because they were considered pornographic. The original manuscript was finally revealed in the book "On the Road: The Original Scroll" published in 2007.

Answer: Camille

After divorcing Marylou, Dean Moriarty married Camille and fathered a child with her. As with Marylou, it was an on-again, off-again relationship as the feckless Moriarty was more interested in kicks and avoiding responsibility.

Kirsten Dunst played Camille in the movie, another character based on a real person, in this case Carolyn Cassady, Neal's wife. In the original manuscript Kerouac used the real names of people involved with him in the story but for legal reasons he was made to change them before the book would be published.

Answer: Garrett Hedlund

Sex and drugs and jazz (rock and roll hadn't been invented yet) were the main interests of many of the characters in "On the Road". Garrett Hedlund portrayed the restless, crazed, thrill-seeking Dean Moriarty. His character was the catalyst that kept Paradise open to whatever life might send his way. This was, after all, a story about a man who wanted to be a writer.

As for the other choices for this question, Leif Anderson played "Chevy Driver" in the movie; Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto have appeared together in J.J. Abrams' two "Star Trek" movies.

Answer: dysentery

When Dean left, Sal tried to rationalize it by imagining the responsibilities Dean had in his life. As his health improved and he was alone with his thoughts, Sal decided that Dean was instead irresponsible and only interested in what caused him little or no pain.

Back in New York, Sal wrote to Dean in San Francisco, intending to visit him. Dean came to New York to acompany Sal back but Sal didn't have the money to make the trip. As Sal and some friends headed to a Duke Ellington concert Dean walked away toward a bus station.

Answer: a 120-foot roll of paper

Though the book ended in a different setting, in the movie (as in real life) the protagonist started typing his story on a long roll of paper. Kerouac perpetuated the story that he wrote "On the Road" on a 120-foot-long roll of teletype paper. The reality is even stranger: Kerouac obtained several large sheets of tracing paper, cut them to the size of typewriter paper and taped them together to form the roll. He typed the whole manuscript as one long paragraph and without margin stops. The roll is occasionally on public display but privately owned.

In the song "Pencil Thin Mustache", Jimmy Buffett's paean to 1950's nostalgia, he sang "And only jazz musicians were smoking marijuana". We found out in "On the Road" that it was a bit more extensive than that. Americans learned that there was a side of life most of them knew little about, or suspected. Other books of the time hinted at it, such as J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" which was published in 1951. Kerouac, after several drafts, completed "On the Road" in 1951 but it was not published until 1957.

At its core, the story was a spiritual quest but in some respects it became a how-to-be-a-hipster manual. It was a sometimes appealing look at life without responsibility, doing something just for the sake of doing it. The Beatnik image from that time, which Jack Kerouac helped foment and perpetuate, lives on. You can still see black turtleneck-clad, beret-wearing, goatee-displaying hipsters snapping their fingers to the music in jazz clubs - at least you can where I live: Las Vegas. Of course, where I live you can still see Elvis.