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Jack Kerouac

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On the Road (Penguin Modern Classics) 01 Edition, Kindle Edition

by Jack Kerouac (Author), Ann Charters (Introduction) Format: Kindle Edition

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'I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's' Bob Dylan

Sal Paradise, a young innocent, joins his hero, the mystical traveller Dean Moriarty, 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, this is the book that launched the Beat Generation and remains the bible of that literary movement.

ISBN-13

978-0241347959
Edition

1st
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

Penguin
Publication date

July 21, 2011
Language

English
File size

3098 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Novel by Jack Kerouac, published in 1957. A formless book, it describes a series of frenetic trips back and forth across the United States by a number of penniless young people who are in love with life, beauty, jazz, sex, drugs, speed, and mysticism. The book was one of the first novels associated with the Beat movement of the 1950s. --New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Jack Kerouac(1922-1969), the central figure of the Beat Generation, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922 and died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969. Among his many novels are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Visions of Cody.
Ann Charters is the editor of The Portable Sixties Reader, The Portable Jack Kerouac, two volumes of Jack Kerouac's Selected Letters, and Beat Down to Your Soul. She teaches at the University of Connecticut.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B005BPAFKO
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin; 1st edition (July 21, 2011)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 21, 2011
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3098 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 301 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #281,620 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #336 in Classic American Fiction
- #761 in Classic Literary Fiction
- #812 in Classic American Literature

Customer Reviews:
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Jack Kerouac

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Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), the central figure of the Beat Generation, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922 and died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969. Among his many novels are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Visions of Cody.

Photo by USGov (National Archives) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Joe R.

Madness!

Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2010

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This wild ride of a novel had me wondering about mortality- not so much my own mortality, but that of some of the characters within. Sal Paradise/Jack Kerouac shares with us his search for...I don't know what. ON THE ROAD recounts some of Kerouac's traveling adventures but the true mystique lies in the fast, reckless, irresponsible, and dangerous lives he and his beatnik buddies lead. Apparently, in the late 1940's, a broke, semi-homeless hitchhiker was the cool thing to be. Kerouac's semi-autobiographical prose is quite poetic. But I hope there is more fiction than fact in this tale, because the characters in this novel are a bunch of misfits.

In the midst of these road trips across America (and Mexico at the novel's climax) there's a lot of drugs, alcohol, womanizing, and stealing going on; all the things your mommy tells you not to do. Yet what I find most fascinating are some of the characters Jack partied with, some of whom became pioneers in the beatnik literary movement.
Here's a little breakdown on who's who:
Dean Moriarty=Neal Cassady
Carlo Marx=Allan Ginsberg
Bull Lee=William Burroughs

Each of these literary figures partied way too hard and it's their life spans that amaze me.
Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady was a major drinker and the biggest A-hole in literature. He's selfish, irresponsible, and untrustworthy. He was also an absent father and a womanizer, just to name a few. But you can't help loving the guy because he knows how to have a good time. Cassady died in 1968 at the age of 41. The cause of his death was unknown but drugs were involved. No surprise there.

Sal Paradise/Jack Kerouac died in 1969 at the age of 47 from an internal hemorrhage. A lifetime of drinking was the cause.

Carlo Marx/Allan Ginsberg, to my shock, also a heavy drinker and drug user, died in 1997 at the age of 70.

Here's the real kicker: Bull Lee/William Burroughs died in 1997 at age 83. Not only was he a big drinker, but he was a heroin addict. He also got away with "accidentally" shooting his wife in the head in Mexico during what he says was a drunken game of William Tell. Go figure.

ON THE ROAD really focuses most on Dean Moriarty. Sal Paradise is obsessed with Dean's free spirit. This book deserves to be canonized as one of the best works of modern literature.

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Donatien

Deeply moving mish-mash

Reviewed in the United States on August 10, 2015

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I started reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and about time, you might say. All my life, I had expected this book to be a sort of hysterical gospel of the beat generation. In a way, it is, but above all it’s a hymn to the United States, its vastness, its sadness, its poetry and melancholy. It’s got something of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie with, in the background, Ennio Moricone’s music for Once upon a time in the West. I’m glad I first went from Arkansas to Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, then New Mexico and Arizona before I read this book. I can taste the wide open vistas, the mesmerizing monotony of endless roads over perfectly flat land, the sense of emptiness in this under populated country. Also, I understand somewhat better Aaron Copeland’s Fanfare for the common Man. All so beautiful and heartbreaking ! Like Kerouac, but under much more comfortable circumstances, I enjoyed the impact of unexpected encounters : an Indian in New Mexico, for instance, at a service station. He’d noticed my Little Rock, Razorback T-shirt, and we started talking. “I just spent several years in Little Rock” he said. “Now, I’m going home” : a simple statement, as moving as a haiku. You could never be friends with these people ; here now, gone a few seconds later, yet they stay with you all your life.
Kerouac’s style has a lot to do with the fascination one quickly feels for the novel. Style can turn an ordinary story into a magic one. Here, sentences are clear, yet enhanced now and then by poetic touches : a misleading simplicity, and no mean feat.
The major drawback lies in Kerouac’s obsession with booze, beer and getting drunk. Characters in the novel - including the main character - are always complaining that they are short of money, and it’s very true that they are not exactly rolling in it, but if they didn’t drink so much, they would have enough to get by, most of the time. The story takes place in 1947. By the time I went to live in North America (Canada is the same) it hadn’t changed. For me, the year was 1963. If a man managed to take a girl to a motel with him, he also had to bring in a bottle of whiskey. Apparently, it’s still like that. What a sad, sad outlook on sex ! Getting drunk on cheap booze instead of getting drunk on each other ! When the body is fighting with 6 shots of Bourbon, orgasms are reduced to the mere release of biological tensions instead of the last movement in a grand symphony of sensations and emotions.
In California, Jack meets a lovely Mexican girl with blue eyes, which prompts an old farmer to say that, at some point, “the bull jumped over the fence.” You just know that their affair is not going to last, even if it keeps on for a few weeks. Jack Kerouac’s talent means that, as a reader, you are more in love with the girl than the author ever was. There is great sadness at their parting (there is great sadness throughout the book), but love, real love, deep love is never an element of the story, and that makes it even more poignant. On the Road is a drifting odyssey of self-centred people who are not even aware that they are self-centred. It’s an ode to complicated losers.

20 people found this helpful

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