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Cover of On The Road by Jack Kerouac

On The Road

Jack Kerouac

  • 310 pages · about 5 hours
  • First published 1957
  • 155 editions
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1 About this book

Sal Paradise, a young writer, meets Dean Moriarty, a free-spirited drifter with an appetite for everything, and is swept along. Between 1947 and 1950 the two of them, with a changing cast of friends, cross the United States again and again in search of jazz, talk and whatever happens next. The novel is closely based on Jack Kerouac's own travels with his friend Neal Cassady, and the central figures of the Beat movement appear in it under other names; Sal is Kerouac himself. It was published in 1957.

  • Classics
  • Autobiographical fiction
  • Drugs
  • Jazz
  • Examinations
  • Literary fiction

2 What to expect

The defining novel of the Beat Generation: a young writer and his wild friend Dean crisscross postwar America by car and bus, in search of jazz, kicks and something to believe in. It has little plot, only a series of journeys told in long, rushing sentences that sound improvised, full of enthusiasm and, later, sadness. The energy is the appeal, and its treatment of women and minorities is careless and dated.

Good for readers who want: a classic road novel, the Beat Generation, and restless, jazz-like prose.

3 About Jack Kerouac

1922–1969

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Of French-Canadian parentage, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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