On the Road

On the Road

Author: Jack Kerouac
Desc: When Jack Kerouac’s On the Road first appeared in 1957 readers instantly felt the beat of a new literary rhythm. A fictionalised account of his own journeys across America with his friend Neal Cassady Kerouac’s beatnik odyssey captured the soul of a generation and changed the landscape of American fiction for ever. Influenced by Jack London and Thomas Wolfe Kerouac always wanted to be a writer but his true voice only emerged when he wrote about his own experiences in On the Road. Leaving a broken marriage behind him Sal Paradise (Kerouac) joins Dean Moriarty (Cassady) a tearaway and former reform school boy on a series of journeys that takes them from New York to San Francisco then south to Mexico. Hitching rides and boarding buses they enter a world of hobos and drifters fruit-pickers and migrant families small towns and wide horizons. Adrift from conventional society they experience America in the raw: a place where living is hard but ‘life is holy and every moment is precious’. With its smoky jazz-filled atmosphere and its restless yearning spirit of adventure On the Road left its mark on the culture of the late 20th century influencing countless books films and songs. Kerouac’s prose is remarkable both for its colloquial swing and for the pure lyricism inspired by the American landscape – ‘the backroads the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna Monongahela old Potomac and Monocacy’. This Folio Society edition is illustrated with evocative photographs of Kerouac and the landscapes of 1950s America. Now acknowledged as a modern classic On the Road remains a thrilling and poignant story of the road less travelled.