One review made Kerouac a bestselling generational spokesperson

Evidence

On the Road had appeared fourteen months before, unexpectedly hailed by the New York Times. The critic, forty-ish freelance writer Gilbert Millstein, anointed the book “the testament of the Beat Generation” in a notice that not only made Kerouac a bestselling author and generational spokesman but transformed him into a star. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 32

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts directly with the reader’s shelf claims about cultural stagnation — here a single reviewer in an establishment paper could convert an obscure subculture into a marketable generational package, raising the question of what infrastructure existed then but not now.