Jack Kerouac on "The Steve Allen Show"

I've posted this clip before, but I enjoy it so much I've decided to post it again on what, let's face it, was never gonna be Jack Kerouac's 89th birthday; it features a performance of On the Road by Kerouac on The Steve Allen Show in 1959.
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Jack Kerouac Reads From "On The Road"

It is a voice simultaneously mannered and casual, confident that it ought to be spoken...  Here's Jack Kerouac, reading from his masterpiece On the Road, accompanied by Steve Allen on piano, and they're both on the top of their game. The year is 1959.

Just a decade later he'd reached the end of the road; on this day in 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida, hemorrhaging from a cirrhotic liver, Jack Kerouac died.
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Lenny Bruce on "The Steve Allen Show"

Lenny Bruce was no stranger to controversy, whether as a petty criminal or a stand-up comedian... Born on this day in 1925, Bruce made this early television appearance in 1950; at the time it was notorious for the first line of the routine - an ad-lib - in which he queried: 'Will Elizabeth Taylor become bar mitzvahed?' The Hollywood beauty had recently converted to Judaism to marry singer Eddie Fisher.

Eleven years later Lenny Bruce was charged with obscenity by police - for using the word 'cocksucker' in a comedy routine in a country renowned as the first to enshrine the freedom of speech in its constitution. Although he was acquitted in that instance, law enforcement began using obscenity legislation to torment Bruce; five years later, in August 1966, he was found dead at his home in the Hollywood Hills of an accidental heroin overdose.
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