On the Road by Jack Kerouac

From the Publisher

Essential Edition handsomely packaged with french flaps, rough fronts, high-quality paper, and a distinctive cover look

On the Road chronicles Jack Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassady, "a sideburned hero of the snowy West." As "Sal Paradise" and "Dean Moriarty," the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience. Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz combine to make On the Road an inspirational work of lasting importance.

Kerouac's classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be "Beat" and has inspired every generation since its initial publication more than forty years ago.

New York Times

The most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat.'.

Lancaster Sunday News

Kerouac wrote with a sense of language as jazz, and Dillon can read like manic ragtime or weary blues.

Audiobookcafe.com

The recording is great. Dillon's ability with voice impersonations, however, drives his performance to the level of genius.

Library Journal

Though Kerouac's masterpiece is not out of print and likely never will be (it still enjoys more than 60,000 sales annually), Viking is releasing a quality hardcover edition to commemorate the 40th anniversary of its original publication. Undoubtedly one of the most influential and important novels of the 20th century, this is the book that launched the Beat Generation and remains the bible of that literary movement. On the Road's publication in 1957 was a wake-up call to the American public that not all its youth were modeled after characters on Ozzie and Harriet: it portrayed Ivy League-educated white kids who smoked dope, hitchhiked, and frequented black jazz joints and Mexican whorehouses. It was the harbinger of the radical changes that would soon sweep society in the 1960s. In addition to the full text, this version includes the New York Times's original book review. A pillar of American literature.

Booknews

A reprint of the novel first published (by Viking) in 1957. And still printed on acidic paper--it deserves better. New, long introduction by Ann Charters. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

David Dempsey

The incessant and frenetic moving around is the chief dynamic of On the Road, partly because this is one of the symptoms of "beatness" but partly, too, because the hot pursuit of pleasure enables Mr. Kerouac to serve up the great, raw slices of America that give his book a descriptive excitement unmatched since the days of Thomas Wolfe. As a portrait of a disjointed segment of a society acting out of its own neurotic necessity, On the Road is a stunning achievement. But it is a road, as far as the characters are concerned, that leads nowhere - and which the novelist himself can't afford to travel more than once.

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