Celebrating the Father of the Road Trip
March 12, 1997 (CNN) -- Lowell, Massachusetts is marking the birthday of its native son Jack Kerouac, the beatnik writer who paved a poetic swath across American literature and made the cross-country road trip a national rite of passage. He would have been 75 years old on Wednesday. Kerouac's second novel "On the Road," published 40 years ago, depicted the depraved odyssey of Sal Paradise, a character who embodied the seedy glamour of the "long trip" (more than one meaning there). Itinerant youth, many born after Kerouac's death in 1969, still carry tattered copies in their backpacks, like a bible of the open road. 
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