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FROM "The Last Resorts", by Cleveland Amory, New York, 1952:

Today’s resort old-timers believe firmly a curious theory of resorts. This theory is that, generally speaking, the following groups have come to the social resorts in this order:

FIRST: Artists and writers in search of good scenery and solitude.

SECOND: Professors and clergymen and other so-called ‘solid people’ with long vacations, in search of the simple life.

THIRD: "Nice millionaires" in search of a good place for their children to lead the simple life (as lived by the "solid people").

FOURTH: "Naughty millionaires", who wished to associate socially with the "nice millionaires", but who built million-dollar cottages and million-dollar clubs, dressed up for dinner, gave balls and utterly destroyed the simple life.

FIFTH: Trouble.

FROM the Independent:

Just after midnight, 50 years ago, Jack Kerouac and his girlfriend Joyce went out to buy a first edition of The New York Times to read its review of On the Road, his second novel.

It has been called the most famous book review in the paper's history. With its publication, Kerouac, who arrived in town on a borrowed Greyhound bus fare, was catapulted to instant literary fame. He would never recover.

The Times' reviewer, Gilbert Millstein, wrote that "There are sections of 'On the Road' in which the writing is of a beauty almost breathtaking."

Mr Millstein's original review is available on the Times' website as an image file. But perhaps Sal Paradise himself deserves a word on this momentous anniversary:

I was standing on the hot road underneath an arc-lamp with the summer moths smashing into it when I heard the sound of footsteps from the darkness beyond, and lo, a tall old man with flowing white hair came clomping by with a pack on his back, and when he saw me as he passed, he said, "Go moan for man," and clomped on back to his dark. Did this mean that I should at last go on my pilgrimage on foot on the dark roads around America?

I'm going to say "Yes".

IT MAY, I think, be justly observed, that few books disappoint their readers more than the narrations of travellers. One part of mankind is naturally curious to learn the sentiments, manners, and condition of the rest; and every mind that has leisure or power to extend its views, must be desirous of knowing in what proportion Providence has distributed the blessings of nature or the advantages of art, among several nations of the earth…

Every writer of travels should consider, that, like all other authors, he undertakes either to instruct or please, or to mingle pleasure with instruction. He that instructs must offer to the mind something to be imitated or something to be avoided; he that pleases must offer new images to his reader, and enable him to form a tacit comparison of his own state with that of others.

Dr Samuel Johnson in The Idler, 23 February 1760