On the Road - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451165624 ISBN 13: 9780451165626

Publisher: Signet (Canadian), 1958

Synopsis

"The only people for me are the mad ones," wrote Jack Kerouac, "the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars." "On the Road" is the classic story of two such characters: Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, who set off on an odyssey through 1950s underground America, fueled by jazz, sex, drugs, mystical philosophy, and a limitless passion for experience.

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

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

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

"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

"One of the finest novels of recent years. . . 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

Edition details

• Publisher: Signet (Canadian)
• Publication date: 1958
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0451165624
• ISBN 13: 9780451165626
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback