Beatniks were passé from the start, but "On the Road" has never gone without readers, though it took decades to lose its outlaw status. Only recently was it admitted—cautiously—to the literary canon. (The Modern Library has named it one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.) Fifty years after "On the Road" was first published, Kerouac's voice still calls out: Look around you, stay open, question the roles society has thrust upon you, don't give up the search for connection and meaning. In this bleak new doom-haunted century, those imperatives again sound urgent and subversive—and necessary. (From Joyce Johnson's "Remembering Kerouac." Sociologists in the 1950s called my generation "The Silent Generation," but we knew that we were laid back and creative, children of the Great Depression who opened, as war veterans, the way into the sixties. "On the Road," inspired in me a promise never to hold a straight job, which I've kept well into my late 70s.)