"Scenes Along the Road is a collection of snapshots of a group of men before they became, as Jack Kerouac put it, 'famous writers more or less.' In the 1940s and early 1950s, when most of the snapshots were taken, they were known only to each other, and these photos are candid shots they took to capture the private moments of their life and experience together. The collection begins with photos of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, Gregory Corso, and John Clellon Holmes living in New York City shortly after World War II, engaged in an 'adventurous education.' The second section focuses on Neal Cassady, who came to New York from Denver in 1946 to meet Jack and Allen, and became the greatest influence on their life style and their writing. In the 1950s, when the scene shifted to San Francisco, the group included Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the period of Zen studies, poetry readings, and Berkeley parties. The last section of snapshots is from Mexico, Tangier, and Europe, the trips abroad before Kerouac and Ginsberg returned to the United States to be famous after the publication of Howl, On the Road, Evergreen Review No. 2, and The New American Poetry. The photos are drug store prints and 'auto-portraits' taken for a quarter at bus stations, souvenirs of a life on the road. Now if they offer glimpses of a time past that looks as distant as our pre-history, it is only because these scenes have changed to become the present, and the road is now a familiar American highway. The final section of the book contains three poems by Allen Ginsberg referring to people, places, and times pictured in the photographs. The captions under the snapshots in quotation marks are also by Ginsberg. Longer quotations from the writing of Kerouac, Corso, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Snyder, and Cassady are identified by the writer's name. All other text, and selection of photographs, is by Ann Charters." -- publisher's statement.