“Everything up there had smelled of ice and snow and heartless spine rock. Here there was the smell of sun-heated wood, sunny dust resting in the moonlight, lake mud, flowers, straw, all those good things of the earth.”
“On the Road” may be Jack Kerouac’s better known work, but “The Dharma Bums” is his true classic. Revisit Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder (standing in for Kerouac and the poet Gary Snyder), as they wander through the 1950s searching for Truth along with other “rucksack” Americans unhappy with their country’s prevailing zeitgeist.