On the Road

Jack Kerouac

Penguin Books Limited, 2000 - Fiction - 280 pages

Five decades after it was first published, Jack Kerouac's seminal Beat novel On the Road finally finds its way to the big screen, in a production from award-winning director Walter Salles (Motorcycle Diaries) starring Sam Riley (Control, Brighton Rock), Garret Hedlund (Friday Night Lights), Kristen Stewart (Twilight), Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams and Viggo Mortensen.Sal Paradise (Sam Riley), a young innocent, joins his hero Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund), a traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat, on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz becomes an exploration of personal freedom, a test of the limits of the American dream. A brilliant blend of fiction and autobiography, Jack Kerouac's exhilarating novel swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion. One of the most influential and important novels of the 20th century, On the Road is the book that launched the Beat Generation and remains the bible of that literary movement.Jack Kerouac (1922-69) was an American novelist, poet, artist and part of the Beat Generation. His first published novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957, that made Kerouac famous. Publication of his many other books followed, among them The Subterraneans, Big Sur, and The Dharma Bums. Kerouac died in Florida at the age of forty-seven.'The most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as "beat"' The New York Times'Pop writing at its best. It changed the way I saw the world, making me yearn for fresh experience'Hanif Kureishi, Independent on Sunday'On the Road sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso machines, and also sent countless kids on the road'William Burroughs

What people are saying

Review: On the Road (Duluoz Legend)

User Review  - Tracy Tibbels - Goodreads

I'm always amazed by what other people think of as a 'classic'. Even the little blurb on the back of the book claims this book changes the lives of those who read it.... Wow. Really? I suppose it was ...

Review: On the Road: The Original Scroll

User Review  - Wells Hamilton - Goodreads

Some unorganized thoughts on this novel: Flowing, rambling, and transforming. "...Only the sensation of death kicking at his heels to move on." Jack Kerouac is able to look on all flavors of humanity ...

About the author

Jack Kerouac (1922 1969) was an American novelist, poet, artist and part of the Beat Generation. Most of his life was spent in the vast landscapes of America or living with his mother, with whom he spent most of his life. Kerouac's best known works are On the Road and The Dharma Bums. Ann Charters, professor of English at the University of Connecticut, has been interested in Beat writers since 1956, when as an undergraduate English major she attended the repeat performance of the Six Gallery poetry reading in Berkeley where Allen Ginsberg gave his sencond public reading of Howl. After his death she wrote the first Kerouac biography and edited his posthumous collection, Scattered Poems. She was the general editor of the two-volume encyclopaedia The Beats: Literary Bohemians In Postwar America and has published a collection of her photographic portraits of well-known writers in the book Beats & Company.

Bibliographic information

• Title: On the Road; Modern classics; Penguin Modern Classics; Penguin books : Fiction : Penguin modern classics; Penguin classsics; Penguin twentieth-century classics
• Author: Jack Kerouac
• Editor: Ann Charters
• Contributor: Ann Charters
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Penguin Books Limited, 2000
• ISBN: 0141182679, 9780141182674
• Length: 280 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General