Product Description

On the Road chronicles Jack Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30160 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Sunday Times
'A pean to what kerouac described as "The ragged and ecstatic
joy of pure being"'

Hanif Kureishi
'A kind of literary James Dean'

William Burroughs
'ON THE ROAD sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso
machines, and also sent countless kids on the road...'

Customer Reviews

reads great, pity about the introductions
It's so great to come back to this book and, though I've only read a little, the extra details of seeing characters names and Kerouac's own sentence rhythms bring it to life in a new way. Plus I love all the details and extra stuff that fill out formerly minor characters.

The awful thing is the introductory essays. The first is good and well researched - it just tracks the history of the various drafts. The others are so pretentious and couched in literary theory jingo - intertextuality, text, deconstruction - and so laboriously written they're surely enough for Kerouac to take a benny, exhume himself and get back on the road and as far away from civilization as possible. (Although to be fair he's pretty far away from it under the ground, but hope you get the point.)

It's very funny, very ironic, when you think he was writing in reaction to the pretentious, elitist literary world that preceded him; and here his fine book is, at its rawest, preceded by these essays. No disrespect to the writers; maybe this is what was asked for and they can write much better than this, but...

Anyway, like I say the text - I mean book - is as good as ever; maybe better.

XXXXXX

I'd like to add as a postscript that, since finishing the book, I believe this is a must for any lover of Kerouac's writing. There is tons of additional material and scenes and, really, this book in all its more-primitive glory supersedes the 1957 published text.

The true rhythm of the IT.
In an interview for Radio Canada conducted in 1967 entitled 'Le sel de la semaine' (`The Salt of the Week'), Jack Kerouac was asked by his interviewer, Fernand Séguin, `Qu'est-ce que Jack Kerouac pense de Jean Kerouac?' (What does Jack Kerouac think of Jean Kerouac?) This was his answer:

I am tired of myself. Well, I know I'm a good writer. A great writer. I'm not a courageous man. But one thing I know how to do is to write stories. And that's all.

Indeed, as proven by On the Road and Kerouac's other novels, poetry and fragmented verse and prose that was not all. This novel, either in its revived or artificially tailored form, expresses notions that cannot simply be measured by saccharine expressions of visceral emotion portrayed through analogues of the reader's personal experience. Kerouac himself had no desire to prostrate himself in front of public exclamations of glory and success. He found scrutiny and examination testing and thus had no intention to impress his readership with his own brilliance. His will was to simply use his skills to elucidate and convey his observances as vividly and as honestly as possible, and to take some satisfaction that his efforts were not in vain. When he did find himself bathed and comforted by praise he found it unsettling:

Kerouac ambiguously craved the public acclaim [...] and that helped to destroy him. He once said that fame was, "like old newspapers blowing down Bleeker Street." But in a 1957 article in the Village Voice, Howard Smith observes Kerouac after reading from his work at the Village Vanguard: "The applause is like a thunderstorm on a July night [...] He is a prince of the hips, being accepted in the court of the rich Kings...He must have hated himself in the morning - not for the drinks he had, but because he ate it all up the way he never really wanted to."

- Ron Sukenick, Down and In

Bohemianism's tendency for dramatic revelation and its unnatural obsession with the aesthetic (that is often at the heart of most modern readings of On the Road and braces a high proportion of its modern popularity), is placed at the far end of Kerouac's spectrum of interpretation. It is pertinent for us as readers to understand the novel's almost voyeuristic nature and distance ourselves from a movement that was born out of a distortion of Beat fascination - a movement that is experiencing a potent revival today. On the Road is not a rallying, galvanising romp through mid-20th Century America, but an account of a desperate struggle for an understanding of God, Earth and self that is never fully realised. Embracing a range of doctrines: Orientalism to the admiration of a wayward and equally lost hedonist, Neal Cassidy (Dean Moriarty), Sal Paradise (Kerouac) races and stagnates through a process of awkward and undignified realisation - an acknowledgement of the fact that there seems to be no real answer to any of life's promises and questions. Kerouac's intentions were not to beatify literature but to expose its limitless bounds. So our admiration of the aesthetic of Kerouac's writing should be simultaneously tempered by detailed analysis of his writing. It should become a necessary tool of our comprehension: as a reader we lack the insight of creation and so we must delve deep into the nuance of expression to locate an understanding. It is foolhardy to focus merely on the art and to deny the context. Kerouac himself was as much a literary critic as drinker or womaniser. It is a fact that Kerouac was stimulated by academia in his teenage years and continued to nurture his intellect throughout his life and career. He was also an accomplished football player, underlining the integral symbiosis of experience and contemplation; an alliance that enriched both his writing and his relation to the universe. It is therefore important to take heed of the initial introduction to this novel; to take a moment to pick through the writers' observances. They are not pompous, misleading or attempting to undermine understanding, but merely concerned with the same problem that Kerouac wrestles with - the question of his own identity, his relationship with God and his responsibility as an individual. If one denies analysis and chooses simply to immerse himself in the tangible he will never be able to experience an intimate mysticism. He will never experience the feel of the rhythm of the 'IT'.

I teach her Christianity.
We neck a little later [...]
I just don't know [...]
I'm a fool in Love with God. Yes

- Kerouac, Satori in Paris.


On the Road is an honest, terrifying, draining and beautiful piece of writing. And should be enjoyed both on the aesthetic and theoretical level.

paragraphs are for squares daddio
What a joy to come back to this after 15 years! 'On the Road' got me hitchhiking round Britain in my early 20's in search of adventure. Admittedly, Newport Pagnell services didn't quite have the romance of Kerouac's endless America vistas, but the spirit was there.

Much has been made of 'On the Road''s experimental nature, and one would expect 'the original scroll' to embody some sort of bebop cataract of overflowing verbiage. In fact, what's self-evident is that Kerouac falls squarely into the American tradition of taut, muscular economy embodied by writers such as Hemingway. Sure, there are passages expositing the ecstatic 'beat' philosophy - but the best bits of 'On the Road' show that Kerouac has a precise, painterly eye for description and a good ear for the rhythms of real speech.

Someone should do a book on Beat writers and lists, because, by golly, there are lots of them. Ginsberg gave us Old Testament Biblical lists in 'Howl' of the 'best minds of [his] generation'. Burroughs lists the features and inhabitants of the nightmarish Interzone in 'Naked Lunch'. Kerouac is no exception - but I like Kerouac's euphoric Whitmanesque lists the best.

The lack of paragraphing is a little annoying and doesn't really add much to the reading experience - the real appeal of this edition lies elsewhere. Most obviously, get 'Bill Burroughs' and 'Allen Ginsberg' instead of 'Old Bull Lee' and 'Carlo Marx' - the original scroll is transparently an act of self-mythologization. Episodes are included that didn't survive the editing process and the whole text has a rougher, more immediate feel to it.

Downsides? Kerouac can come across as something of a misogynist. In the Beat World, women principally seem to be either wives or prostitutes. The wives exist to stop our 'free-spirited' heroes from spending all the family budget on whiskey and disappearing for two-months. The prostitutes break your heart and steal your whiskey money. Tellingly, Kerouac uses the same verb ('balling') to describe making love and driving a car very fast down the freeway. It's also a little hard to see Neal Casady as the 'American Saint' Kerouac followed, not least because hipster slang just sounds daft now - you real gone daddy!

In truth, if you haven't read the original published version I'd go for that one. The 'Original Scroll' does broaden our experience of 'On the Road' but it seems odd to see it as some sort of ur-text. It's true that Kerouac originally refused to have the manuscript edited - but this does not necessarily mean that this is the 'authentic' text.

If you have read the novel already there's a veritable feast to enjoy here. Straight from the fridge, baby!