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SUMMARY: Few novels have had as profound an impact as On the Road, and Kerouac's vision continues to inspire: three generations of writers, musicians, artists, and poets cite their discovery of On the Road as the event that "set them free." This hardcover edition commemorates the fortieth anniversary of the original publication of an American classic. On the Road chronicles Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent, from East Coast to West Coast to Mexico, with his friend Neal Cassady, "a sideburned hero of the snowy West." As "Sal Paradise" and "Dean Moriarty," the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience. Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz combine to make On the Road an inspirational work of lasting importance. In its time Jack Kerouac's masterpiece was the bible of the Beat Generation, the essential prose accompaniment to Allen Ginsberg's **Howl**. While it stunned the public and literary establishment when it was published in 1957, it is now recognized as an American classic. With **On the Road**, Kerouac discovered his voice and his true subject—the search for a place as an outsider in America. **On the Road** swings to the rhythms of fifties underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns, and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveler and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. "Life is great, and few can put the zest and wonder and sadness and humor of it on paper more interestingly than Kerouac." —Luther Nichols, **San Francisco Examiner** "Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, **The Sun Also Rises** came to be regarded as the testament of the Lost Generation, so it seems certain that **On the Road** will come to be known as that of the Beat Generation." —Gilbert Millstein, **The New York Times** **@Didn’tTypeOnTP!** For TWITTERATURE of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, please see On the Road by Jack Kerouac. **From *Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less*** ### Amazon.com Review *On The Road*, the most famous of Jack Kerouac's works, is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, *On The Road* is thinly fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers, and fellow travelers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of Kerouac's alter-egos, *On the Road* is a cross-country bohemian odyssey that not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication but penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture. ### From Publishers Weekly In introducing the fabled first draft of Kerouac's autobiographical novel-written on a single giant roll of paper, without breaks in the text, in an amphetamine-fueled marathon-editor Howard Cunnell refers to Allen Ginsberg's claim that "the published novel is not at all like the wild book Kerouac typed in '51." Characters are identified by their real names (rather than the 1957 version's apt pseudonyms) and their love affairs are more explicit, giving the book a juicy memoir-like feel, especially where Cassady and Ginsberg are concerned. The plot, however, is identical. Neal Cassady joins Kerouac and Ginsberg's bohemian circle in New York in the late 1940's, and inspires and cons them into traveling around the country, "searching for a lost inheritance, for fathers, for family, for home, even for America." The death of Kerouac's father plays a larger role in the story than in the 1957 version; and Justin W. Brierly, a teacher who served as mentor to Cassady and has a cameo in the published book, makes a series of recurring appearances in the scroll. The lack of paragraphs or chapters emphasizes the breathless intensity of Kerouac's prose. The anniversary publicity will introduce this classic to a new generation of readers, and while the scroll probably won't displace the novel's more familiar, polished incarnation, it will be of keen interest to beat aficionados and scholars. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.