Synopsis
On September 5, 1957, Viking published Jack Kerouac s novel On the Road. Few books have had as profound an impact on American culture. Pulsating with the rhythms of late-1940s/1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open road, Kerouac s classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be "Beat" and has inspired generations of writers, musicians, artists, poets, and seekers who cite their discovery of the book as the event that "set them free". This edition commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication of an American classic. Based on Kerouac s adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose four cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naïveté and wild abandon, and imbued with Kerouac s love of America, his compassionfor humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the...
The New York Times - Luc Sante
The biggest immediate difference between the first draft and the finished product…is that while we know On the Road as a novel—the great novel of the Beat Generation—the scroll is essentially nonfiction, a memoir that uses real names and is far less self-consciously literary. It is a dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, and, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos, as well as of gratuitous punctuation supplied by editors more devoted to rules than to music, it seems much more immediate and even contemporary&#The scroll clarifies the book's connection to the past—to Mark Twain and tramp narratives and Woody Guthrie and cowboy sagas—and underlines the features it shares with its nearest contemporaneous cultural relative, Robert Frank's great photographic road book The Americans. The novel that On the Road became was inarguably the book that young people needed in 1957, but the sparse and unassuming scroll is the living version for our time.