Kerouac, though a serious artist and a fiercely loyal purveyor of the bohemian lifestyle he wrote about, nonetheless found his idea of the Beat Generation being opted and sold to Hollywood and popular American culture. Movie rights were discussed, beatnik characters began to appear in popular television shows, and Mad Magazine did a parody of the Beat culture. Though On the Road is a novel about a group of young people who live off the map of American culture, the beatnik culture took on a life of its own in the American consciousness after 1957. His interviews appeared in mass-market publications like Life and Playboy, and he appeared on television. With the publication of On the Road, Kerouac became the face and voice of the Beat Generation. By 1957, the American public had begun to gain awareness of the beatnik culture, mainly through Allen Ginsburg's obscenity trial for his book Howl, as well as other media events. It was On the Road, published in 1957, that catapulted him to fame, largely on the strength of a single review in the New York Times in September of that year. No author of the Beat Generation was as influential and widely read as Jack Kerouac.
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