There isn’t a week that goes by without my selling a copy or two of Jack Kerouac’s book, On the Road. Consequently, I always have a supply of new copies on hand and try and buy every used copy that I can. These used copies often cost a bunch. For example, a “well read” first run .25 cent Signet Paperback published in 1959 retails today for between $18 and $80 dollars—depending on whether you live in Berryville Arkansas or New York City. New copies of On the Road are offered in every format, including DVD, and more than 130,000 paperback copies are sold every year.

These robust sales (3.5 million since 1969) look like evidence that there are a lot of dope-addled college sophomores out there. In point of fact, the people who buy On the Road in Berryville tend to have recent haircuts and pretty good jobs, and it’s been a long time since they were sophomores at anything. If they share defining characteristics it may be their air of apologetic wistfulness and their impeccable manners.

Without beating around the mulberry bush, On the Road is a terrible book. Truman Capote’s famous putdown, “This isn’t writing…it’s typing,” while among the meanest things that inherently mean little jerk ever said, was mean for its obviousness: when I was an authentic dope-addled college sophomore, even I had a hard time finishing the book. Why then its enduring popularity?

I believe that it has to do with the power of myth, and the power of an idea. In reality, Jack Kerouac was a small town mama’s boy so excruciatingly shy that he had to get loaded before he could carry on a conversation. On the other hand, the myth of Kerouac is, in his own words, that of “a sweet working-class Buddha,” where “everything belongs to me because I am poor.” The innocence of these statements, and the perfect exuberance therein, expresses our most cherished and terminal human desires; to be free of and above care, to possess a humble and simple heart, and to be “sweet.”

A myth so powerful cannot avoid co-option by the mass market. As William Burroughs sardonically wrote, “Kerouac has opened a thousand coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis.” I myself in recent memory have lusted after a new Volvo, and my kid owns a half dozen pairs of khakis from The Gap. Both of these durable brand names bore the image of Kerouac as an element in their sales pitches. The iconic Dharma Bum has become quite simply another marketing gizmo.

The Idea of On the Road is another matter entirely and not available for co-option or nomination by the market place, however efficient or monolithic that free market may be. That Idea is about the yearning we all feel from time to time to just go! To head out West for fun, or profit, or to raise hell. At its core then, On the Road is as American as apple pie, a story whose theme is Manifest Destiny, whose best promoter was Horace Greeley, and whose motif is the slap happy self-importance of young men.

This is the great virtue of On the Road. Its other great virtue is that it is not art, and it is certainly not art for art’s sake. It was not written for a literary clique or the academy and the language used is not a secret language: what Kerouac had to say was more important then how he said it. Ultimately then, however terrible the book is, it is also terribly important.

Perhaps the wistful, well-mannered persons who buy On the Road from me harbor the desire (certainly they harbor the desire) to reconnect with the Idea of motion, of going somewhere, of filling themselves with Kerouac’s kinetic energy and innocence. Although we may be old and tired we still see the “me” of a time long ago, a time when we stood by the side of the road with our thumb in the air, going somewhere.