Last Friday would have been Jack Kerouac’s 99th birthday. One of the online commemorations linked to this extraordinary clip from a 1959 television appearance on the Steve Allen Show. Kerouac reads from On the Road while Allen plays some bluesy jazz lines beneath him. The appearance was to promote an album that Kerouac and Allen had just released, called Poetry for the Beat Generation. It also seems to be one of the few film clips of the Beat icon reading his own work.