On the Road - Softcover

Kerouac, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140274154 ISBN 13: 9780140274158

Publisher: Penguin Books Canada, Limited, 1998

Synopsis

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 fulfillment 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 exhilarating novel defined the new 'Beat' generation. It had tremendous impact on both sides of the Atlantic and made him famous overnight.

About this title

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.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books Canada, Limited
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0140274154
• ISBN 13: 9780140274158
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304