On the Road was the book that launched the beat generation into international prominence in the 1950′s. The story although not autobiographical, was still a reflection on a part of Jack Kerouac’s life. The narrator of the story Sal travels back and forth across the US by car and train moving in and out of a group of friends including the now famous Dean Moriarity. Dean part saint and part petty criminal helps Sal to realize the direction his life is taking him.

Highly Recommended

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
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 fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac’s real life friends, lovers, and fellow travelers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of Kerouac’s alter-egos, On the Road is a cross-country bohemian odyssey that not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication but penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture.–This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly
Fans of Kerouac get the whole beautiful, groovy deal with this new recording of the radically hip novel that many consider the heart of the Beat movement. Poetic, open and raw, Kerouac’s prose lays out a cross-country adventure as experienced by Sal Paradise, an autobiographical character. A writer holed up in a room at his aunt’s house, Paradise gets inspired by Dean Moriarty (a character based on Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady) to hit the road and see America. From the moment he gets on the seven train out of New York City, he takes the reader through the highs and lows of hitchhiking, bonding with fellow explorers and opting for beer before food. First published in 1957, Kerouac’s perennially hot story continues to express the restless energy and desire for freedom that makes people rush out to see the world. The tale is only improved by Dillon’s well-paced, articulate reading as he voices the flow of images and graveled reality of Paradise’s search for the edge.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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The outlaw spirit seething underneath 1950′s conformity, February 2, 2002
Reviewer: Linda Linguvic (New York City) – See all my reviews

Published in 1957, this autobiographical novel by Jack Kerouac captured the spirit that was seething underneath 1950s conformity. Myth has it that he typed it non-stop for three weeks, using one long continuous sheet of paper. I understand it went through several drafts after that but it still holds the immediacy of that marathon typing session, the staccato rhythm of the words creating improvised rhythm across the page with little, if any punctuation.
The narrator, Sal Paradise, is on an epic quest, one that takes him back and forth across the country with Dean Moriarity who is based on the real-life Jack Cassady. Dean, the reform school escapee who specializes in stealing cars, is Sal’s mentor. And it is the automobile that is their chariot, which keeps them constantly in motion. Dean’s madness is glorified, as is his ability to do whatever he pleases. There are a lot of drugs in the book, but liquor seems to be their drug of choice. They leave the heroin for a character loosely based on the real William Burroughs. Women drift in and out of the story, usually as one of Dean’s lovers who he treats terribly. Dean treats everyone terribly though, abandoning Sal on several occasions, once while Sal was suffering from dysentery while they were in Mexico. Sal, however, always forgives Dean, seeing him as a god-like hero, no matter what he does.

There’s more to the book than the story though. The book is a trip, in every sense of the word. With the simple force of his writing, Kerouac took me on an adventure. With him I crisscrossed America, hitchhiking, walking, taking buses. With him I sat in a car driven by Dean Moriarity, speeding for hours at 110 miles an hour and not even thinking about a seatbelt. I met the pathetic women who loved Dean and didn’t feel a bit sorry for them. I felt the quest in Dean’s heart for his hobo father who he constantly searches for. And, I experienced the jazz, felt the heat and smelled the sweat in the many small bars, felt my head reel from the whisky and the sound all around me, stayed awake all night listening to sounds and being alone with the music in a room full of people. Yes, I felt I was there with the travelers, enjoying vicariously the thrills and the chills and knowing this would be my only entry into that world. Jack Kerouac eventually became an alcoholic and died an early death, but I’m personally grateful for this book he left behind and the experience of reading it. Highly recommended.

A 20th Century Classic, October 25, 2000
Reviewer: C. Ebeling “ctlpareader” (PA USA) – See all my reviews

In a time reverse way, I felt dated, reading this very modern piece of writing with my postmodern consciousness. At first I felt like I was in the ejector seat of a convertible without seatbelts doing 110 MPG with a drugged or drunk driver commandeering the steering wheel. Well, we the readers, not to mention the characters, are. But all the boozing, drugs, women, and breaking of various Commandments don’t have the consequences we’d expect in a more recent novel. Instead, we learn about the holy pursuit of getting high on life, especially as it is lived on the edge. A gang of characters is wrapped like a hurricane’s winds around Dean Moriarty whose bipolar (postmodern judgment there) energy flows inspire antic cross country road trips across several years. In a book that’s fueled by organic movement, there comes the day when the characters have to move on and away after they have achieved the highest (literally) point in their travels, and that’s the ultimate consequence, that the momentum dissipates.
I had put off reading this book, thinking I couldn’t handle one long abstract rant, which it isn’t, though I’d picked up that impression somewhere. Kerouac sings like Whitman in a voice that is at once poetic and yet concretely journalistic. It is urgent, thus propelling its content, peeling away the past and future. There is artistic skill and knowledge at work in every sentence.

I read the critical introduction last, so it would not color my experience. It is an excellent introduction, one addressing more autobiographical detail than text, but all the same, read it as an afterward; I think Kerouac would want you to live the book unfettered by context.

On the Road, A masterpeice of american literature, November 17, 2005
A Kid’s Review
In the 1950′s, a generation of lost souls was forming. A generation with no great war to fight anymore, a generation trying to find a cause to commit to. On the road, an autobiographical novel of Jack Kerouac’s experiences traveling across the great American continent, touches on many of the aspects of this generation of downtrodden people. A generation of beat people.

On the Road delves deep into the psyche of some of these beats. Their lives of intellectual warfare, and hopes of endless good times. Traveling from one city to another, working to survive and getting caught up in the endless jazz, some losing themselves to drugs, dying alone and cold on the streets. Tight groups of individuals closed to those not of their mindset.

This work of literature is a wonderfully written adventure that takes one to the ends of America, and even beyond the ends of ones mind and emotion. Kerouac’s style is unique and filled with heart and passion, along with sorrow. This highly acclaimed book comes very highly recommended for those of you who like to experience something different on the intellectual side of life, and those who want to test the bounds of their soul.

A “NOVEL” ALLEGORY FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF MID-CENTURY JAZZ, November 2, 2005
Reviewer: STEPHEN T. McCARTHY (a Mensa-donkey in Phoenix, Airheadzona.) – See all my reviews

“We’ll pick up Hazy Davy and Killer Joe
And I’ll take you all out to where the gypsy angels go
They’re built like light
And they dance like spirits in the night (all night) in the night (all night)
Oh, you don’t know what they can do to you
Spirits in the night (all night) in the night (all night)
Stand right up now and let them shoot through you”

- ‘Spirits In The Night’ by Bruce Springsteen

I happened to spend a night in Lowell, Massachusetts while on a road trip two months ago. Being back in Jack Kerouac’s hometown, I seized the opportunity to pick up a copy of his most famous book, ON THE ROAD, for a young co-worker. When I learned that he was only halfway through the book after 6 weeks of reading, I pulled my old copy from the shelf to see if it was more complex than I remembered it being – I hadn’t read it since the age of 19 or 20. (*No, it’s predominantly high school level writing.) I intended to read but a page or two, but found myself sucked in, and went through the entire book as fast as Dean Moriarty drives through “the fatal red afternoon of Illinois.” (For those of you who have never read this cult classic, that translates to 110 mph.)

Ostensibly, the story is an existential look at America played out in the form of multiple cross-country road trips conducted by a variety of “beat” characters or “hipsters” from 1947 to 1950. Of course it also captures the hedonism of the original “Lost Generation.” But in a way it also illustrates the development of Jazz in that era – something that escaped my notice when I first read it. When Sal Paradise (Kerouac’s first-person narrative voice) undertakes his first trip to the West coast, his plans are all mapped-out, nice and orderly: “I’d been poring over maps of the United States in Paterson for months…on the roadmap was one long red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely, Nevada, and there dipped down to Los Angeles. I’ll just stay on 6 all the way to Ely, I said to myself and confidently started.” [pg. 10]

It is not long before Sal’s plans get scrapped and he’s forced to improvise his way West. This mirrors the movement of Jazz at the time. The rigidly structured musical charts (roadmaps) of the Big Bands were gradually giving way to more free-form Jazz, as musicians began to explore greater possibilites within the genre. By the book’s conclusion, Sal, Dean, and various hangers-on are blasting through the nights and days in a wild frenzy of (sometimes illogical) driving and drinking, and womanizing with reckless abandon. Just as the Jazz musicians had gone to the outermost edge of melody and then abandoned all musical structure with wild flights of fancy – the “Bebop” saxophonists and pianists whose musical aspirations were to create wholly personal, improvisational expressions which often became as self-indulgent as the road trips and misadventures of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. And throughout the story we find the two protagonists in smoke-filled Jazz clubs in the wee hours, nodding their heads, banging on tables and exhorting the players to Go cat, go!

And “GOING” in the pursuit of the unnamed “IT” is another major component of the story. “We all realized we were…performing our one and noble function of the time, MOVE. And we moved!” [pg. 134] “Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.” / “Where we going, man?” / “I don’t know but we gotta go.” [pg. 240] “If you go like him all the time you’ll finally get it.” / “Get what?” / “IT! IT! I’ll tell you – now no time, we have no time now.” [pg. 127] “Man, this will finally take us to IT!” said Dean with definite faith. [pg. 265] But Dean Moriarty never does define “It” because he can’t. I believe that Sal Paradise comes as close as they ever get to the object of their quest when on page 147 he relates that “as the river poured down from mid-America by starlight I knew, I knew like mad that everything I had ever known and would ever know was One.” But then he gets distracted by illusory, mirage-like pleasures deceptively promising to lead him to “It”, and he subsequently loses the scent in an alcohol haze.

It really doesn’t surprise me that the first car I actually loved, I had named, SAL, after Kerouac’s character who was forever on the road. And many aspects of the story call to mind my own LIQUIDATED YOUTH when I cavorted with the spirits in the night (all night, every night) and friends known collectively as THE LEAGUE OF SOUL CRUSADERS, and individually as Napoleon, Cranium, Twinkie, and Pooh. Yours Truly was sometimes referred to as Mr. Intense. And then there was our red-headed unofficial leader, Yoey O’Dogherty, known by the nickname of Torch, who served as our “Dean Moriarty” with his contagious passion for life and his magnificent acts of magic behind the wheel of Tiburon, his 1963 Cadillac. There was virtually NOTHING that Torch couldn’t get Tiburon to do (except obey the rules of the road). I caught the essence of The League Of Soul Crusaders in a 1983 poem that concluded with the lines, TELLING JOKES AND HOWLING / TO NOWHERE. And that could just as easily describe the exploits of our boys in ON THE ROAD.

By no stretch of the imagination is ON THE ROAD truly great literature. It’s one of those books that found its niche by coming along at just the right time with a new “language.” What makes it interesting is its ability to convey the unharnessed energy of youth, and to portray an exuberance for experience that resonates with primarily young readers (and old hippies). While there are far better and more important books for you to spend your limited time with (and although I always preferred Kerouac’s, ‘The Dharma Bums’), ON THE ROAD is a somewhat worthwhile read and I can generally recommend the “trip”, though I would caution you against emulating the immoral self-centeredness of its principal characters. (And I can tell you from many years of experience that you’re never going to find “It” at insane parties and wild bars, nor while crossing the country at 110 miles per hour in a tequila or chemical-induced stupor.)

They raced madly, wildly, chasing after IT. Looking here, looking there; tracking IT through the loud neon-painted nights and always seemingly one step behind IT. I’ve got IT now! I can feel IT – the heat, and hear ITS breathing. I can sense ITS powerful presence here. And yet IT is gone again; ever elusive, never materializing. And Sal and Dean never realized that IT dwelled within them. The one place they never thought to look. They toted IT with them in their crazy, frenzied and futile attempt to find IT. And with Kerouac’s poor body utterly wasted from drugs and alcohol, he died a sad, bloated death in 1969 at the age of forty-seven, never having located IT. And IT died with him.

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