On the Road

Jack Kerouac

Dec 1976 · Sold by Penguin

About this eBook

Jack Kerouac’s classic American novel of freedom and the search for originality that defined a generation

“An authentic work of art.”—The New York Times
 
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 naïveté 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.

Ratings and reviews

While I can understand why people feel inspired by the basic premise of this book (i.e. 2 normal guys hitchhiking across the US and simply doing whatever they wanted to do), I think everything else about this book is terrible. Firstly, the story has no plot. The main characters wander around America aimlessly doing pretty much nothing; they are not attempting to accomplish any sort of goal or feat. Essentially the main characters hit the road, drink, party, enjoy some good times with friends, and hook up with women. Each trip that the characters make follows this basic pattern. As such, I was quickly bored because the characters simply repeat the exact same things on each trip. Perhaps one might say that because this book is more or less an autobiography, it therefore needs no plot. This leads to my next point that none of the characters develop in any interesting way. Who they are at the beginning is who they are at the end. And who they are is not worthy of emulating in the slightest.

Long and winding tale of a few young men looking for happiness in all the wrong places. A description of their lives, unhindered by any form of plot or character development. Superb writing, but going nowhere slow.

I didn't even buy this book my one year old did, I tried getting a refund but nothing the services suck, I didn't even read or download the stupid thing.

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.