from the autobiographical Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson, published in 1984.

*

There was a newstand at Sixty-sixth Street and Broadway right at the entrace to the subway. Just before midnight we woke up and threw on our clothes in the dark and walked down there still groggy with the heaviness, the blacked-out sleep, that comes with making love. According to Viking, there was going to be a review.

"Maybe it'll be terrific. Who knows?" I said. Jack said he was doubtful. Still, we could stop at Donnelly's on the way back and have a beer.

We saw the papers come off the truck. The old man at the stand cut the brown cord with a knife and we bought the one on the top of the pile and stood under a streetlamp turning pages until we found "Books of the Times." I felt dizzy reading Millstein's first paragraph-- like going up on a Ferris wheel too quickly and dangling out over space, laughing and gasping.

On the Road is the second novel by Jack Kerouac, and its publication is a historic occasion insofar as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion (multiplied a millionfold by the spirit and power of communication).[ . . . ] the most beautifully executed, the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as "beat," and whose principal avatar he is. Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the Lost Generation, so it seems that On the Road will come to be known as that of the Beat Generation.
[--Gilbert Millstein, New York Times, September 5, 1957.]

Jack was silent. After he'd read the whole thing, he said, "It's good, isn't it?"

"Yes," I said. "It's very, very good."

We walked to Donnelly's and spread the paper out on the bar and read the review together, line by line, two or three more times, like students poring over a difficult text for which they sense they're going to be held responsible.

It was all very thrilling-- but frightening, too. I'd read lots of reviews in my two years in publishing: None of them made pronouncements like this about history. What would history demand of Jack? What would a generation expect of its avatar? I remember wishing Allen was around to make sense of all this, instead of being in Paris.

Jack kept shaking his head. He didn't look happy, exactly, but strangely puzzled, as if he couldn't figure out why he wasn't happier than he was.

We returned to the apartment to go back to sleep. Jack lay down obscure for the last time in his life. The ringing phone woke him the next morning and he was famous.