On the Road

Jack Kerouac

Penguin, 2008 - Autobiographical fiction - 290 pages

Jack Kerouac's On the Roadrocked the establishment with its seminal, stream-of-consciousness portrayal of 1950s underground America. Amidst a whirlwind of sex, drugs and jazz, writer Sal Paradise and his hero 'the holy con-man with the shining mind', Dean Moriarty traverse the country in search of life and experience. Wild and exuberant, this life-changing novel defined the Beat generation and inspired countless others.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - steve02476 - LibraryThing

A you-are-there history from a few years before I was born (actually published a few months before i was born). I'm surprised I never read it before, I wonder what effect it would have had on me had I ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - rsairs - LibraryThing

I read this book 50 years ago as a teenager. I bought this copy at City Lights in San Francisco. I still don't understand how something can be so ugly and beautiful at the same time. I still can't figure how lives so degraded could at the same time be so transcendent.

About the author

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. In 1947, enthused by bebop, the rebel attitude of his friend Neal Cassidy, and the throng of hobos, drug addicts and hustlers he encountered in New York, he decided to discover America and hitchhhike across the country. His writing was openly autobiographical and he developed a style he referred to as 'spontaneous prose' which he used to record the experiences of the Beat Generation. Among his many novels are On the Road, Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bumsand Big Sur. He died in 1969.

Bibliographic information

• Title: On the Road; Popular Penguins Series
• Author: Jack Kerouac
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Penguin, 2008
• ISBN: 0141037482, 9780141037486
• Length: 290 pages