The Road Gods Beckoned - Basho

From today's writer's almanac: "On this day in 1957, Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road was published by Viking Press. The Beat Generation classic was based on road trips Kerouac made with his friend Neal Cassady in the late 1940s. Kerouac started writing the novel on April 12, 1951, and finished on April 22. He taped together sheets of tracing paper to create a 120-foot-long scroll.

Jack Kerouac wrote: 'In America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it [...] and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen.' "