Two incredible works of literature were published only a year apart on this day, Jack Kerouac's counterculture classic On The Road in 1957, and Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago published for the first time in the US in 1958. Both were hailed as instant classics upon release, and while content wise, they are different, both shared a degree of notoriety for the content.

Jack Kerouac wrote On The Road in a blazing three week period and was largely autobiographical. Written as a stream of consciousness and based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America, it is often considered a defining work of the postwar Beat Generation that was inspired by jazz, poetry, and drug experiences. As the inspiration came from real life, hundreds of references in On the Road have real-world counterparts and the novel is filled with characters based on Beat figures like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

Boris Pasternak traveled an even longer road to get Doctor Zhivago published. He completed his epic love story in 1956, during the strict Communist regime that imposed censorship on Russian art and literature. The content of the book infuriated Soviet officials and Soviet Press refused to publish the book. Admirers of Pasternak's work, however, began secretly to smuggle the manuscript out of Russia piece by piece. By 1958, the book began to appear in numerous translations around the world, including an edition in the United States that appeared on September 5, 1958. The book was hailed as an instant classic and Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. Unfortunately, the acclaim did not help Pasternak, as the Soviet Union refused to allow him to accept the award and he was banished from the Soviet Writers Union. He passed away in 1960 and it was not until 1987 under Mikhail Gorbachev's democratic reforms, that Pasternak was re-admitted into the union and his life's greatest work was finally published in his native Russia.