Much has been written about the Beat generation, especially the hold its radical freedom has had on the American imagination. The Beats who stand out in most of our minds are men, and the freedom they enjoyed – a freedom of movement, of creativity, of sexuality – is coded as a particularly masculine kind of freedom. My article will suggest that in their autobiographical texts On the Road and The First Third Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady construct an itinerant masculinity in an attempt to escape bourgeois patriarchal structures without abandoning traditional patriarchal definitions of male power. The hero is a man on a journey: the frontiersman, the pioneer, the cowboy, the explorer, who subdued the wilderness and inscribed "America" ​​on the continent. Moving unhindered across American frontiers, they exemplified the freedom of complete self-creation. Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Editor's Note," which serves as the introduction to Neal Cassady's The First Third, positions Cassady in the American heroic tradition as representative of the...