On the Road

When Jack Kerouac-s On the Road first appeared in 1957, readers instantly felt the beat of a new literary rhythm. A fictionalised account of his own journeys across America with his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac-s beatnik odyssey captured the soul of a generation and changed the landscape of American fiction for ever. Influenced by Jack London and Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac alway When Jack Kerouac-s On the Road first appeared in 1957, readers instantly felt the beat of a new literary rhythm.

A fictionalised account of his own journeys across America with his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac-s beatnik odyssey captured the soul of a generation and changed the landscape of American fiction for ever. Influenced by Jack London and Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac always wanted to be a writer, but his true voice only emerged when he wrote about his own experiences in On the Road. Leaving a broken marriage behind him, Sal Paradise (Kerouac) joins Dean Moriarty (Cassady), a tearaway and former reform school boy, on a series of journeys that takes them from New York to San Francisco, then south to Mexico.

Hitching rides and boarding buses, they enter a world of hobos and drifters, fruit-pickers and migrant families, small towns and wide horizons. Adrift from conventional society, they experience America in the raw: a place where living is hard, but -life is holy and every moment is precious-. With its smoky, jazz-filled atmosphere and its restless, yearning spirit of adventure, On the Road left its mark on the culture of the late 20th century, influencing countless books, films and songs.

Kerouac-s prose is remarkable both for its colloquial swing and for the pure lyricism inspired by the American landscape - -the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy-. This Folio Society edition is illustrated with evocative photographs of Kerouac and the landscapes of 1950s America. Now acknowledged as a modern classic, On the Road remains a thrilling and poignant story of the road less travelled.