An American Icon
In On the Road the narrator, Sal Paradise (the personification of Jack Kerouac) states to the reader, "He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted to so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him...Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me."
Read more about this topic: Neal Cassady
Famous quotes containing the word american:
“There is not a more disgusting spectacle under the sun than our subserviency to British criticism. It is disgusting, first, because it is truckling, servile, pusillanimous—secondly, because of its gross irrationality. We know the British to bear us little but ill will—we know that, in no case do they utter unbiased opinions of American books ... we know all this, and yet, day after day, submit our necks to the degrading yoke of the crudest opinion that emanates from the fatherland.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)