On the Road: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) - Softcover

Kerouac, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140283293 ISBN 13: 9780140283297

Publisher: Penguin, 1999

Synopsis

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 naivete 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 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 fictionalised autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers and fellow travellers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of Kerouac's alter-egos, this cross-country bohemian odyssey not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication but penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture. --Acton Lane

Review:

"An authentic work of art . . . the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat, ' and whose principal avatar he is." --Gilbert Millstein, The New York Times

"On the Road has the kind of drive that blasts through to a large public. . . . What makes the novel really important, what gives it that drive is a genuine new, engaging and exciting prose style. . . . What keeps the book going is the power and beauty of the writing." --Kenneth Rexroth, San Francisco Chronicle

"A highly euphoric and intensely readable story about a group of wandering young hedonists who cross the country in endless search of kicks." --Leonard Feather, Downbeat

"On the Road is perhaps the supreme American romance . . . a mystical and poignant reminder of lost youth, and those sublime years when everyone feels immortal." --The Guardian, "The 100 Best Novels"

"[On the Road] changed my life like it changed everyone else's . . . It speeds by like a freight train . . . You grabbed ahold of the train, hopped on and went along with him, hanging on for dear life." --Bob Dylan

"Kerouac turned up the temperature in American letters, and it's never gone down since." --John Updike

"[On the Road] showed me that you could do things that weren't sypposed to be done. Suddenly, I realized I wasn't the only one to think I was a nut because I had strange thoughts. Finally, here was somebody telling the truth." --David Bowie

"If [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

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0140283293
• ISBN 13: 9780140283297
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304