Product Description
First published in 1957, this novel epitomized to the world the Beat philosophy. It chronicles a spontaneous and wandering life style founded both on jazz and drug-induced visions.
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Amazon.com 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 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.
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 My all time favorite
I have lost count of how many copies of this book I have bought and given away over the years. A must read and a great book to give away to friends and family. I want everyone in the world to read this book.
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 Not enough out of the ordinary happens ( -------------------------------------------- )
A book about several trips by the author across the USA, east to west, and (in the last account) down into Mexico, in the misspent days of his youth, usually with his wayward pal Dean Moriarty.
The author's method of writing is to chuck loads of material into the book. So we have detail, detail, detail. Bars, people, places to sleep, rides taken, jobs done, women slept with, locations travelled through, yellow sunrises, mauve sunsets, mountains, more people, etc etc. The book doesn't rest. It moves on and on, through detail after detail.
The problem is, it isn't fascinating detail. Okay, it fills pages, but so would an account of anyone's life, and the details in this book aren't so special that turning the pages to the end is made especially worthwhile. It's just about travelling, journeying, and what happens to occur along the way.
A lot of the prose is excellent, but the book's content lacks sufficiently special interest to justify me recommending this book to anyone.
Should you read it? Probably not. You could read forty or fifty pages for the flavour if you want to, and then decide, but what you find there will be the sort of material that's replicated throughout the rest of the book, more or less, so why read more than that?
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Still Joyous After all these Years. ( tuebormedia )
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2ROJFBGOFUASY I was a little afraid to revisit Kerouac's classic given that I am no longer an adolescent. It still holds up in my mind and I enjoyed rereading it very much.
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 Passionate, Poetic, and Nihlistic ( gft )
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was initially fascinated by the heavily ornate style of novelist Thomas Wolfe, a writer best known for LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL; at the same time, however, he led an outsider's life that placed him on the fringe of American society, drifting across the country with little more than the clothes on his back, drinking hard, using drugs, and occasionally involved--at least in a passive sense--with a series of criminal activies, most notably Lucien Carr's murder of David Kammerer. In 1951, however, Kerouac suddenly shed his infatuation with Wolfe and, in a three week spree fueled by drugs and alcohol, wrote ON THE ROAD.
The book had tremendous difficulty finding a publisher, and did not reach the public until 1957, when it tapped into the rising undercurrent of society's rising dissatisfaction with the American status quo. Highly autobiographical in nature, it chronicles Kerouac's off-the-cuff roamings from New York to California and all points in between and presents a fairly nihlistic portrait of hustlers, users, abusers, derelicts, and the exhausted desperates of the era, all of them presented in a random and kaleidoscopic mannner.
There's no doubt that ON THE ROAD was and is a highly influential book, inspiring everyone from Bob Dylan to Hunter S. Thompson; it essentially reshaped notions about subject and style. But almost from the moment of its publication there has been a core complaint: what, ultimately, is the book about? What is the point? There is no plot per se, no linear story per se, simply a series of incidents and events and portraits. The leading characters, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty (in actual fact Kerouac and Neal Cassady) rush headlong, speeding for the sake of speed, engaging in activities that raise their levels of desensitization and lead them to exhausted ennui that self-destructs into madness, self-pity, and despair--and the work ends as suddenly as it began.
In terms of literary success, the language is the thing. Kerouac can turn a phrase with the best of 'em, and his passions roll of the page in a series of bright images that transcribe the power of youth, the urge we all have to do the unacceptable just for the fun of it, a great rush of words that explode and recombine and tremble in an amazing jumble of the beautiful and the sordid. In a very real sense, language is "the point," the way in which Kerouac speaks is "the point." But there is indeed an overall point, although it may not be one that many will appreciate, much less enjoy.
The point, ultimately, is that there is no point. It is all speed for the sake of speed, movement for the sake of movement, and the fact that in spite of their nationwide crisscrossing and adventures, in spite of the passing affairs, drugs, alcohol, arguments about philosophy, and jolts of jazz neither Sal nor Dean are able to find any actual point or purpose--something that Sal seems to ultimately understand but that Dean is never really clear on. As such, ON THE ROAD not only taps into the underlying dissatisfaction that characterized America of the 1950s, it also forecasts the restlessness of the 1960s and the hedonism of the 1970s and 1980s.
It's easy to grant ON THE ROAD status on all these points, but it is more to difficult to recommend it as a "casual" read. It is not, and never really has been, the sort of thing you pick up at random; it requires a fair amount of concentration and, ideally, a certain prior knowledge of the "beat" writers, thinkers, and figures upon which the work is founded. It also requires the ability to read without any particular expectation in terms of structure and narrative line, as well the ability to place its dated slang and attitudes in historical perspective. If you can do all that--you'll love it. If not, this is one you'd do better to pass by.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
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 Don't believe the hype ( angry_mogs )
On the Road: one of those books that people will claim they've read in order to sound cool at snooty parties or score with the earnest and naive alterna-chick, who is amazingly non-conformist, just like all her friends of course. This is a book that far more people claim to have read than have actually read, and among those of us that have actually read it, we come away feeling "wow, what the heck was all the fuss about?" I'll offer the benefit of the doubt and suggest it maybe was fresh, interesting, or what have you when it came out, but I don't see anything special about a couple of road trips that don't go any place really interesting. Semi-autobiographical, all Kerouac demonstrates is his being used and abused by junkie friends, which left me with an impression of Kerouac as a complete wannabe, always on the outside or the periphery looking in, never really part of this crowd he somehow managed to get hooked up with, more tolerated than anything, and a complete doormat, and dressing it all up in the most pretentious dribble imaginable. News flash people, it ain't _that_ good. I read it once when I was 17 and thought "hey this is pretty cool" a mere five years later at 22, I read it again and thought "seemed a lot cooler before I had any actual life experience" including several cross country road trips and some time overseas. I'm 31 now, and even less enamored. Not profound. Not even enjoyable, and certainly not deserving of its reputation. "I saw the most gullible minds of my generation, suckered in by horrible beatnik writing" ;)
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