I read the Dharma Bums as an unsure, directionless 20-year-old. The book is Jack Kerouac’s lightly fictionalized account of his relationship with poet Gary Snyder and their outdoor escapades in the Sierras and throughout the Bay Area.
Kerouac’s jubilant and endearingly naïve insights on outdoor adventure as a conduit for a meaningful, spiritually fulfilling life affected me profoundly. I ditched my pursuit of an English degree to study nature and geography. I aspired to join the Dharma Bum “rucksack revolution”: devoting my life to wandering mountains and forests and refusing to “subscribe to the general demand that [we] consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming.”