On the Road

Kerouac, Jack

ISBN 10: 0140152199 / ISBN 13: 9780140152197

Published by Penguin, 1992

About this Item

Sprache: Englishnglish Taschenbuch ,

Seller Inventory # 572969

Bibliographic Details

• Title: On the Road
• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication Date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140152199
• ISBN 13: 9780140152197
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: gut
• Seller catalogs:
  • varia

About this title

Synopsis

In its time Jack Kerouac's masterpiece was the bible of the Beat Generation, the essential prose accompaniment to Allen Ginsberg's Howl. While it stunned the public and literary establishment when it was published in 1957, it is now recognized as an American classic. With On the Road, Kerouac discovered his voice and his true subject-the search for a place as an outsider in America. A penniless writer named Sal Paradise becomes inspired to hitchhike across America, taking the listener on a freewheeling journey through the 1950s youth counterculture. Joining up with other fellow vagabonds who are in love with life and open to adventure, they explore jazz, sex, drugs, and mysticism on the fringes of society. Credited as the book that launched Jack Kerouac's career, On the Road epitomized to the world the generation that Kerouac himself named as "beat." It created a sensation by chronicling a spontaneous and wandering way of life in a style that seemed founded both on jazz and on drug-induced visions.

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.