Description

By (author) Kerouac, Jack; Introduction by Charters Ann

Jack Kerouac”s Great American Novel, now in a delightful new Clothbound Classics edition

On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion.

Review quote:

The most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the
generation Kerouac himself named years ago as “beat”

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Pop writing at its best. It changed the way I saw the world, making me yearn for fresh experience

Review quote:
On the Road sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso machines, and also sent countless kids on the road

Biographical note:

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. Educated by Jesuit brothers in Lowell, he decided to become a writer at age seventeen and developed his own writing style, which he called ”spontaneous prose”. He used this technique to record the life of the American ”traveler” and the experiences of the Beat Generation, most memorably in On the Road and also in The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums. His other works include Big Sur, Desolation Angels, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Gerard, Tristessa, and a book of poetry called Mexico City Blues. Jack Kerouac died in 1969.