Trip Trap

On a rainy night in San Francisco, just before Thanksgiving in 1959, Jack Keroauc, Lew Welch, and Albert Saijo piled into Welch's car and set off on a cross-country trip, headed for New York City and then on to Keroauc's mother's home on Long Island.

Trip Trap is a record of that journey, notes from the road by three of the central figures of the Beat Movement as they shared booze and coffee and peanut butter sandwiches, talking and singing and versifying while the country slipped by out the...