The Lonely Way Back Home (Benjamin Braddock, 4/23/25, IM1776)
The antecedent of the counterculture was a melange of conservatives nostalgic for pre-industrial community and urban radicals dreaming of post-industrial utopia. Both shared a deep skepticism toward centralized authority, technological determinism, and mass consumer culture.
It’s for this reason that authors such as John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac—two of Dylan’s major literary inspirations—are often perceived as “leftist” or “crypto-Bolshevik”, despite their work showing a deep affection for American traditions, ideals, institutions, and the American people. It’s clear from Sea of Cortez, East of Eden, or Travels with Charley: In Search of America that Steinbeck simply loved the country too much to want to see it radically changed, whether through communism or capitalism (fundamentally two sides of the same coin: industrial society). As for Kerouac, his 1957 roman à clef On the Road, which became a defining work of the Beat generation and has since endured as one of the most widely popular books among young men, even as it celebrated freedom and adventure, was fundamentally a work of American romanticism, not radical politics. Its protagonists sought transcendence within the American landscape rather than revolutionary transformation of American society.