Kerouac never would have gone on any of the trips without his friend’s urging. Cassady took Kerouac, aka Sal Paradise, on numerous journeys from east to west, north to south, and even into Mexico. On the most fundamental level, Kerouac’s novel celebrated his coast-to-coast driving adventures with his manic friend Neal Cassady, given the name Dean Moriarty in the book. On The Road celebrated not only the movement of a road trip, but the optimism that came with it, the belief that no matter how hopeless or stagnate things had become wherever you were, there was bound to be something better somewhere else-all you had to do was get there. Suddenly students, readers and even highbrow professors could enjoy the act of reading so much that they wouldn’t even realize that their understanding of the human condition had just been elevated. With On The Road, the great American road trip was legitimized at the same time the great American novel was democratized. ![]() The three genres of fiction, as American readers approached them in the 1950s and as obscenity law differentially judged them, are the subject of Ruth Pirsig Wood, Lolita in Peyton Place: Highbrow, Middlebrow, and Lowbrow Novels, 1995.When Jack Kerouac’s On The Road appeared in 1957, it changed not only the idea of the classic American novel, but the whole notion of what a novel could be, and it did it in such an entertaining and easy-to-eat way that the whole concept of literature was suddenly taken from college professors in tweed jackets, turtle necks and jaunty goatees and passed down to anyone who could read. It was popularized by the American writer and poet Margaret Widdemer, whose essay "Message and Middlebrow" appeared in the Review of Literature in 1933. It consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff that they ought to like". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word middlebrow first appeared in print in 1925, in Punch: "The BBC claims to have discovered a new type-'the middlebrow'. The opposite of highbrow is lowbrow, and between them is middlebrow, describing culture that is neither high nor low as a usage, middlebrow is derogatory, as in Virginia Woolf's unsent letter to the New Statesman, written in the 1930s and published in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942). The term was popularized in 1902 by Will Irvin, a reporter for The Sun who adhered to the phrenological notion of more intelligent people having high foreheads. The first usage in print of highbrow was recorded in 1884. Levine, "Prologue", Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, 1990: 3 highbrow is currently distanced from the writer by quotation marks: "We thus focus on the consumption of two generally recognised 'highbrow' genres-opera and classical" (Tak Wing Chan, Social Status and Cultural Consumption 2010: 60). The term highbrow is considered by some (with corresponding labels as 'middlebrow' 'lowbrow') as discriminatory or overly selective (Lawrence W. ![]() "Highbrow" can be applied to music, implying most of the classical music tradition and literature-i.e., literary fiction and poetry to films in the arthouse line and to comedy that requires significant understanding of analogies or references to appreciate. The word draws its metonymy from the pseudoscience of phrenology, and was originally simply a physical descriptor. Used colloquially as a noun or adjective, " highbrow" is synonymous with intellectual as an adjective, it also means elite, and generally carries a connotation of high culture.
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