"'The Beats' Go On", excerpt from The Exeter Bulletin, Winter 2007

Walter Salles (in blue sweatshirt) visits Exeter to film a Harkness discussion of Kerouac's writing

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a milestone that will be marked in a number of ways. Viking, which had heavily censored Kerouac’s original manuscript, will publish an unexpurgated edition of On the Road. Meanwhile, that manuscript—a 120-foot-long scroll on which Kerouac composed his novel during a three-week period in 1951—is now on tour, and will be on view this summer in Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, MA.

Salles—whose Oscar-nominated film The Motorcycle Diaries chronicled the on-the-road adventures of another iconic figure, Che Guevara—is making a documentary about Kerouac, produced by Francis Ford Coppola’s company American Zoetrope. Last spring, after filming in Lowell, Salles and his crew swung by Exeter to film a Harkness class discussion of On the Road—an unlikely sounding detour that begins to make sense as you talk with the course’s instructor, George Mangan.

Mangan first read the novel in the early 1960s when he was studying for the priesthood, and it literally changed his life. “I responded to everything in On the Road,” says Mangan, who dropped out of seminary and went on his own quest for experience, a journey that eventually led him back to college and grad school and into teaching. Mangan joined the Exeter English department in 1976, and the following year proposed a course on Kerouac and other Beat Generation writers—an idea, he says, that was met with little enthusiasm at the time.

Continue reading the article as it appeared in The Exeter Bulletin...

Interested in learning more?

Read about Harkness teaching...

Check out Exeter's English department offerings...

Learn more about Exeter's faculty...

See the full issue of The Exeter Bulletin, Winter 2007...