At Lilac Evening, Jack Kerouac in Denver
Denver Public Library, Denver, CO USA 2007

In 1951, a young writer named Jack Kerouac rolled several scrolls of teletype paper into his typewriter and then in a three-week burst of creative energy wrote On The Road, a novel, which, after it was published, six years later, would come to define a generation. Based in part on his own life traveling back and forth across the United States in the mid to late 1940s, this novel was written in a spontaneous but highly disciplined style of writing, which very effectively documented the ways people during this time lived and spoke.

Most notable of these people, perhaps, was the character of Dean Moriarty, a brilliant and charming raconteur, street kid and heart breaker from Denver, Colorado, whom Kerouac based on his close friend and occasional traveling partner, Neal Cassady. Kerouac visited Cassady in Denver for the first time in the late 1940s, when cowboys and hobos still roamed the rail yard neighborhoods off of Larimer and Platte St. and the tallest building downtown was the Daniel and Fisher Clock Tower on what today is the 16th St. Mall.

Cassady had grown up just east of there in Curtis Park. He was baptized at the Holy Ghost Church and went to school at Ebert Elementary. His father had a barber shop at 727 Larimer St. near the string of Missions off of 15th and as a child he played on the grounds of the Puritan Pie Company while his father sold bootlegged whiskey and traded haircuts for pies. Later, as a young man, he played pick up baseball on Sonny Lawson’s Ball Field off Welton St. and 23rd and spent the early hours of the morning in Five Points eating tacos and listening to jazz.

He was, as Cassady himself put it in his memoir The First Third, the “unnatural son” of Denver’s ragged downtown streets and the makeshift community of working men and migrant families who made their home there, day laborers from Oklahoma City and Los Angeles, female headed households from Mexico and New Orleans. In his movements and his voice, his choice of words and his ideas Cassady embodied them all. Which to his friend, the young writer Jack Kerouac, seemed impossibly beautiful, impossibly foreign. In On The Road he wrote “At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton … in Denver … feeling that the best … (my) world had offered (me) was not enough ecstasy … not enough life, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.”

To Kerouac, a first generation American of French Canadian descent, himself the “unnatural son” of the small industrial city of Lowell, Massachusetts and Columbia University in New York, to walk the worn out and beaten down streets of Cassady’s Denver was to find himself walking through an American ideal, an American dream, which he, in turn, would forever immortalize in his valentine to the United States, On The Road.

Text by Audrey Sprenger, Ph.D. Photographs by Ashley Vaughan. At Lilac Evening is the final installment of a three-part documentary series created by Audrey Sprenger and Ashley Vaughan on the 50th Anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. It was exhibited at the Denver Public Library in 2007 in conjunction with the exhibition of Kerouac’s “On The Road Scroll.”