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On the Road: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
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On the Road: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) Paperback - 1999

by Jack Kerouac

The indisputable bible of the Beat Generation, "On the Road" (1957) fictionalizes Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent with his friend, Neal Cassidy.


About this book

Perhaps the most famous and influential of the Beat novels, Jack Kerouac's On the Road represents much of what made the Beat and Counterculture movements so unique and important. The plot concerning the road trips and adventures experienced by Kerouac and his friends is well-known, as are the rumors and tall tales of the books' production.

Kerouac often claimed that the wrote On the Road in a mere three weeks on a single 120-foot scroll of paper. Although that scroll does indeed exist and is featured in museums, Kerouac kept detailed journals of his travels that would later become passages and chapters in the finished product. The book was first published by Viking in 1957. 


Viking Press would go on to publish an edited version of On the Road in 2007 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first printing. They substituted the fictional names for the real Beat protagonists, and they even included some of the more sexually explicit passages that were edited out of the 1957 edition.


Due to the cultural significance of the book, true first editions/first printings of On the Road are quite valuable. But be warned: it is easy to mistake reprints or book club editions for the real thing, so always check with an expert before making a significant purchase.

Summary

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.

On the Road swings to the rhythms of fifties underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns, and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveler and mystic, the living epitome of Beat.

"Life is great, and few can put the zest and wonder and sadness and humor of it on paper more interestingly than Kerouac."
—Luther Nichols, San Francisco Examiner

"Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the Lost Generation, so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of the Beat Generation."
—Gilbert Millstein, The New York Times


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From the publisher

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 naivet 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.

First line

FIRST MET DEAN not long after my wife and I split up.

First Edition Identification

On The Road was first published by Viking in 1957. True first printings of the book include the $3.95 pricing information on the top right hand corner of the front inside dust jacket flap. Later printings and subsequent book club editions do not feature the price in that location. Additionally, a photo of Kerouac is featured on the back inside cover flap along with a brief description of the author.

Details

  • Title On the Road: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
  • Author Jack Kerouac
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition [ Edition: Repri
  • Pages 304
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Penguin Group, E Rutherford, New Jersey, U.S.A.
  • Date 1999-06-01
  • ISBN 9780140283297 / 0140283293
  • Weight 0.73 lbs (0.33 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.42 x 5.62 x 0.82 in (21.39 x 14.27 x 2.08 cm)
  • Ages 18 to UP years
  • Grade levels 13 - UP
  • Reading level 940
  • Themes
    • Chronological Period: 1950's
    • Chronological Period: 1950-1999
    • Topical: Coming of Age
  • Library of Congress subjects Autobiographical fiction, Beat generation
  • Dewey Decimal Code FIC

Media reviews

Citations

  • Ingram Advance, 06/01/1999, Page 102

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.
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