On the Road

Kerouac] hadn't written On the Road, The Doors would have never existed . . . that sense of freedom, spirituality, and intellectuality—that's what I wanted in my own work." —Ray Manzarek "My teenage years were soaked in Kerouac. I wanted to go on a road trip with Neal Cassady. The expanse of the American West became implanted in my imagination." —Colum McCann "On the Road, The Dharma Bums . . . That was my starting point, the Beats putting poetry—spoken word—and jazz together." —Van Morrison Product Description The legendary novel of freedom and the search for authenticity that defined a generation, now in a striking new Pengiun Classics Deluxe Edition Inspired by Jack Kerouac's adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naiveté and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up. About the Author Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of “one vast book,” The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. part one 1 I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I’d often dreamed EAN: 9780140283297 Package Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches Languages: English