Product Description

Sal Paradise, a young innocent, joins the slightly crazed 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 exhilerating novel defined the new 'Beat' generation. It had tremendous impact on both sides of the Atlantic and made him famous overnight.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6141 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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 fictionalised autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers and fellow travellers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of Kerouac's alter-egos, this cross-country bohemian odyssey not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication but penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture. --Acton Lane

About the Author
Jack Kerouac was born in Massachusetts. He had written his first novel by age eleven and decided to become a writer at seventeen. He called his style 'spontaneous prose' and recorded the life of the American 'traveler' and the experience of the beatgeneration of the 1950s. He was working on his longest novel of all, a surrealistic study of the last ten years of his life, when he died in 1969, aged forty-seven.

Customer Reviews

An important book, if not a great one
On the Road is very much a book of its time. Based around Sal Paradise (who Kerouac has said is based on himself) and his travels back and forth across America (and eventually to Mexico), it's a relentless tale of the need for adventure when life seems stagnant and lonely. With no ties to keep him in any one place, Sal gets in a car with his friends whenever the desire takes him, searching for answers to life's big questions.

Filled with the jazz music of the late 40s, Jack Kerouac's book is like a stream of consciousness, and although this often makes the book hard to 'get into' (I don't think I managed more than 20 pages at a time due to the sometimes disjointed and sometimes repetitive writing style), it does leave you with a real yearning need to get out there and see the world. An important book, if not a great one.

Okay, I get it..
I understand how books like Kerouac's get elevated to cult status. Take Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing for example, that was much the same as Kerouac and other Beat writers. It was not very poetic or well written but it took you somewhere, to a time and state of mind that was free and different for a new generation. Fear and Loathing is decent, this however is not. Certainly not worth the hype, it's long and boring and as a book alone it has no literary merit. You may read about him, his life and the ephemera around the book - then you may appreciate this more, but standing alone this has to be one of the worst books ever slapped on the high pedestal.

`A primer on how to be a narcissist.'
Before I read `On The Road' I read a critical review by a blog psychiatrist who denounced the work as `a primer on how to be a narcissist.' This struck me as accurate, but not as a valid criticism. The self absorbed characters coping with alienation from of their environment and the consequent dissatisfaction with everything the world offers up is this books strength. The novel describes a particular generation from a particular place and it does so unfalteringly.