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On the Road (Penguin Modern Classics) |  | Author: Jack Kerouac
Creator: Ann Charters
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99 (9.32EUR)
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Seller: awesome_books_001
Rating:  42 reviews
Sales Rank: 668
Media: Paperback
Edition: New Ed
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.1 x 1
ISBN: 0141182679
EAN: 9780141182674
ASIN: 0141182679
Publication Date: August 13, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Features 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.
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
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 42
wild , yet formidable - a Very compulsive read/ on the road ,,,,, Jack Kerouac August 9, 2010
Dr Finklestien (manchester, england)
Well where do I indeed start ,mmmmmmm well read it in a week and as I don't have a lot of time that was pretty darn quick for me , I thought this book ( considering the time it was written in ) was a litery masterpiece I found at first " like where is this all going" but as you get further into the story you find yourself becoming one with it and are completly lost in it all a totally compelling and wonderfull story of how the beat generation came about and the extremly colourfull lifestyle's surrounding Jack and his friends . Brilliant .
 "I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up." April 11, 2010
"Blackbird" Campbell
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
In June 1950 Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac hit the road in Denver to drive more than 1,700 miles to Mexico City to visit William Burroughs. Kerouac found it "the most pleasant and graceful trip in the world," and Mexico struck him as "the magic end of the road." The "civilized" world he'd left behind was gripped in Cold War paranoia. The U.S. had built the hydrogen bomb in January 1950, and the Korean War had begun on June 24. Kerouac was convinced that the world was lost, and he might as well die. But high on grass, bouncing along Mexican roads, he experienced a happy hallucination: a microburst of gold shot from the sky right into his startled eyes. This was the moment, he later wrote, that at last made "On the Road" possible, the "great occasion" when he had the vision that Neal was God, and God had the face of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the hero who had saved the world from oppression and slavery.
The book describes the road-trip adventures across the U.S. and Mexico and Kerouac's relationships with other Beat writers and friends (don't ever call them beatniks). He dates the narrative at 1947, marking it as a specific era in jazz history, "somewhere between its Charlie Parker Ornithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis," and it inspires Sal to think of his friends "from one end of the country to the other...doing something so frantic and rushing about." He starts out in New York, passes Chicago and drives across the continent to San Francisco, where Sal takes a job as a night watchman at a boarding camp for merchant sailors. But he is soon on the road again, where he meets one of his biggest temptations. Her name is Terry, and he meets her on the bus to LA. She is Mexican, and has run away from her husband. They spend "the next fifteen days...together for better or for worse." Sal spends the better part of a week with Terry and her family in a migrant worker's camp which he experiences as disillusioning.
When Neal and Jack (writing as Sal) reached the city, Mexican hipsters had already preceded them, establishing a beachhead on Calle Redondas, where they peddled dope and crucifixes. The two friends found an apartment close to Bill and Joan Burroughs, who had fled the U.S. after Bill's last drug bust and was writing "Junky," one of the classic confessional romans à clef of Beat literature. But Mexico City turned out to be a disaster and soon Jack found himself at loose ends, stayed stoned, smoking fifteen joints a day, and helped himself to Bill's morphine. After another hallucination in which he saw himself canonized as the saintly hero and prophetic author of "On the Road," he left July 1950 and began walking to New York, occasionally hitching a ride. Despite the pain and heartbreak of his Mexican misadventure, "On the Road" was taking shape in his soul.
Sal's last attempt at finding an answer to his problems is this trip through the Mexican countryside to Mexico City with Dean and a hanger-on. Some of the novel's more memorable scenes depict their marijuana-infused introduction to Mexican culture, including a vivid (but expensive) sojourn to a bordello offering mambo music and underage prostitutes. The novel ends a year later in New York, where Dean invites Sal and his girlfriend to move to San Francisco with him. The arrangements fall through and Dean returns to the West alone. Sal closes the novel sitting on a New York pier during sunset, looking west. He reminisces on God, America, crying children, and ends with "I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
Jack's life in New York was as tumultuous as his stay in La Mexica, but in April 1951, the book that's built upon several notebooks and previous drafts tentatively titled "The Beat Generation" and "Gone on the Road," took its final form as an elegiac ode to Neal (as Dean Moriarty), narrated by his sidekick, Kerouac (as Sal Paradise), although he kept it brisk and simple in a no-frills reportage style. Though completed quickly, Kerouac had a long and difficult time finding a buyer for his work. Publishers rejected the manuscript due to its experimental writing style and its sympathetic tone towards minorities and marginalized social groups of post-War America. Many editors were also uncomfortable with the idea of publishing a book that contained, what were for the time, graphic descriptions of drug-use and homosexual behavior, a move that could result in obscenity charges being filed.
The book was published in 1957 by Viking and created a sensation. Archibald Mac-Leish praised it to his Harvard class, Nelson Algren sent a wire full of praise and Charles Olson called Kerouac "the greatest writer in America." In Kerouac, the largely collegiate audiences began to embrace a new concept of literature: a glory in roughness, a raw, living texture, bold and unfinished as a Pollock or a de Kooning. Modern readers will see Kerouac in a different light, of course, but even today you can see young people making pilgrimages to Jack's grave, leaving notes, prayers, joints, or just empty wine bottles.
This book changed my life February 18, 2010
Weshimulo (Wiltshire, UK)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Kerouac's novel is one of the greatest books about America ever written. In fact it is one of the greatest books ever written. Period. Moving to an internal jazz soundtrack and incubated in its sharp blending of poetry and prose, torn clothes and weary nights alone, Kerouac's semi-autobiographical portrait of seven years he spent roaming America is full to the brim with exuberance, energy, joy and what Kerouac called "The ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being" It is a novel of possibility, adventure, excitement and youth.
I must warn you that buying this book will make half of your bookshelf obsolete. The ultimate poetic love letter to a youth savored and enjoyed. The ultimate description of the joy of opportunity which will leave you dizzy, breathless and high on life. All the influential counter-cultural figures of the 50's and 60's had this book in their back pocket when they wrote the great records, books or made the great films that swung the perpetual whiplash of perception permanently to pastures 'cooler'.
The story is a simple one, Sal Paradise (a pseudonym for Kerouac) meets Dean Moriarty following his divorce and follows him with a madcap group of free spirits across America. Trying drugs, having sex and taking in jazz shows. The characters talk, laugh, fall in and out of love and by the fifth chapter of so, you are taking your place in the back of the car, edging out enough space to sleep for a few hours before roaring off on the next day's adventure. Everything is perfectly described, vivid and evocative, every line perfectly judged, melodic and full of wonder. The ultimate description of the life you actually want to live.
Knowing that Kerouac wrote the whole thing on one continuous scroll and imbued it with an almost religious fervor, pouring his very essence into the words allows us to really see the significance and importance of such a life changing novel. He wanted us to see how much fun was out there, waiting to be had.
Everybody should read this novel at least once in their life.
The long and winding road February 15, 2010
Dave Gilmour's cat (on Dave Gilmour's boat)
Jack Kerouac's masterpiece: what's so great about this book is that its style and structure so closely reflect what it's about, i.e. motion. It's easy to get swept up in the thrilling urgency of this writing (you know this book HAD to be written), which is like a great jazz player riffing on a theme. Who else got this close to describing what it is to be alive? It's up there with Moby-Dick and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a contender for the Great American Novel.
Private heroes January 28, 2010
Charles Wahab (London, England)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Everyone has a hero in their life. Someone that you will meet and will change your life forever. Someone who has too much life running through his veins it spills over to everyone around him. She lives the way we'd like to live but can't, he does the things we mean to do but never get to. He changes the way they we view life, think about it. He breaks the rules, removes the chains, and eventually burns himself out in the process. She gives us a point of reference on how we want to live.
Many have that hero,the odd guy in the neighbourhood, the crazy friend, the defiant family member.Our own hero. The ones who don't, have Dean Moriaty.
Kerouac talks about a group of friends driving across America (and mainly the East Coast, and hence different and much refreshing change than the ever so clichéd "lets go West" books), with Dean Moriaty as the daring one who never hesitates to jump into a car, even if it was a stolen one, and drive, often with only a suggestive destination, that may as well end up somewhere completely different, simply "for kicks". The beauty of this book is that it's not about Dean, who is leading the adventure, but Sal (Kerouac) who is living it, but also reflecting on it.From Denver to Mexico, Kerouac embarks on a journey of discovering , observing, and experiencing that isn't like any other, its about physically doing it. Wherever you are, Europe, the US or Asia, on the road is a journey of self discovery, for the ordinary man, his personal heroes, and her personal struggles.
We all get "on the road" someday. I read this book at a time when I was travelling between Scotland, England, France and Germany, catching trains across the European continent, battling an impulsive smoking habit and catching up with old friends, and seeing new places. For anyone who lives in New York or London or any other big city, the world really isn't just the city, and he is right.
It is timeless, for in a globalized world we are all searching for identity. Sal tells us how to do it, and who to do it with.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 42
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