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With the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road making its notch on September 5, we're ruminating on its (and Jack Kerouac's) impact on the boomer generation. We might say in the 1950s environment of conformity, the influences of such iconoclasts as Kerouac and his beat compatriots showed coming-of-age boomers how to break the mold. This was true in terms of its free-flowing literary style and the free-flowing lifestyle it espoused.

In contrast to the crew-cut, buttoned-down '50s, On the Road presented true-to-life characters -- Dean Moriarity (Neal Cassady) in particular -- that quested to experience heightened life in the now by liberating from presiding social and moral constraints. Other icons of the time, such as James Dean in film or Jackson Pollack in painting, represented the same kind of personal and metaphorical defiance of following traditional paths or behaving "correctly."

In this way, the Beats and their literature were very much the godparents of the hippies, who came to define our boomer confrontations with the powers that be in law, politics and lifestyle. And On the Road, as very much the Beat bible, acted as a roadmap for the hippies' quest for self and righteousness, or quest to escape self in alternative consciousnesses.

The operative word here is quest: the idea that sometimes it takes getting lost in order to be found, and sometimes it takes breaking out of the mental prisons others have constructed for us in order to free a whole society. And often the messiahs modeling such journeys come to sad ends, even as they bring us into balance and enlightenment.

For our generation, On the Road was such a seminal work. It encouraged us to act up, act out, and come to terms with responsibility in discovering who we were and how we could make this world a better place.

And 50 years later it still appeals to the young in this same way.

Editor, Jeff Stein (Jeffry John Stein), is the author of Life, Myth, and the American Family Unreeling.