On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition

On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition
by Jack Kerouac

On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition
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Book Summary Information

Author: Jack Kerouac
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-08-16
ISBN: 0670063266
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Viking Adult

Book Reviews of On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition

Book Review: Kerouac's Seminal Book Still Haunts and Resonates a Half-Century Later
Summary: 5 Stars

In commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of its first printing, Viking Press has republished Jack Kerouac's seminal work in a new hardcover version. There is no question that his story still resonates because the writing is still ripe with human insight and attitudes that have changed little when it comes to seizing the day. The novel focuses on innocent Sal Paradise, who narrates the story, and his inspiration, a wild spirit he meets in New York named Dean Moriarty. As polar opposites, they share but one common bond, a pervasive feeling of desperation in a time when the Cold War produced a spiritual void and a sense of nihilism. Their response is to set out on the road and live life one precious moment at a time. Through Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness narrative, the two experience life in all its dimensions in all sorts of settings throughout the country, whether in sleepy towns, rural areas or big cities, bouncing from New York to Chicago to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Mexico and back again.

In the process, Sal and Dean meet some memorable characters along the way in places as diverse as a Virginia diner, a New York jazz nightclub and a Mexican border bordello. The jazz, poetry and drug experiences that Kerouac chronicles have a palpable feel about them as they represent how the characters dealt with their often desperate feelings about death, an ethos quite central to what the Beat Generation was all about back then. The prose can get quite maddening at times, but that is exactly Kerouac's point, the fact that life is not a carefully constructed story with a message. In fact, much of the book resulted from the author's scribblings in tiny notebooks he kept while traveling for a period of seven years. Even though there is a dated feeling in the portrayal of the American Dream specific to that period, the novel still haunts with Kerouac's imagery of people whose individual spirits either crushed them or left them still searching for greater meaning.

Summary of On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition

A 50th anniversary hardcover edition of Kerouac's classic novel that defined a generation

Few novels have had as profound an impact on American culture as On the Road. Pulsating with the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open road, Kerouac's classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be "beat" and has inspired generations of writers, musicians, artists, poets, and seekers who cite their discovery of the book as the event that "set them free." Based on Kerouac's adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose four cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed na?vet? and wild abandon, 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. This hardcover edition commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of the novel in 1957 and will be a must-have for any literature lover.

Celebrating 50 Years of On the Road
In three weeks in a Manhattan apartment in April 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote his first satisfactory draft of On the Road as a single, 120-foot scroll. On the Road: The Original Scroll prints the text of this remarkable literary artifact in book form.
Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think): John Leland, author of Hip: A History, argues that On the Road still matters not for its youthful rebellion but because it is full of lessons about how to grow up.


From the back cover of On the Road: The Original Scroll: Jack Kerouac displaying one of his later scroll manuscripts, most likely The Dharma Bums


Kerouac's map of his first hitchhiking trip, July-October 1947 (click image to see the full map)

Original New York Times review of On the Road (click image to see the full review)

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