Product Description

On the Road chronicles Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent-from East Coast to West Coast to Mexico-with his friend Neal Cassady, "a sideburned hero of the snowy West."

Read by Will Patton

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58451 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Amazon.com Review
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 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. 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)

From AudioFile
The year 2007 marked the 50th anniversary of this modern classic, and an audio interpretation is a marvelous way to experience Kerouacs free-flowing prose. Will Patton, noted for his performance of books by James Lee Burke, is a fine match for this text. ON THE ROAD is a winding, meandering journey, and Pattons performance as narrator provides the map. His voice brings the vitality of Kerouacs sense of spontaneity into being. Patton creates distinct voices for the two main characters, speaking for Kerouac in the guise of the observant Sal Paradise and for his friend Neal Cassady in the guise of the pleasure-seeking Dean Moriarty. Patton is appropriately quiet or exuberant, optimistic or cautious, and an ideal guide into the experience that is ON THE ROAD. R.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About the Author
Jack Kerouac was born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York, where he met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published by Viking in 1957, that made him one of the best known authors of his time. Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

Customer Reviews

It was OK
In 1992, while a graduate student, I decided to discover the real America by setting off on a road trip - from Berkeley to Austin Texas. I was joined by a neurotic New Yorker and a Mexican citizen, both of whom happened to hanging about the student co-op house on Durant Avenue. I had met only days before they volunteered to come along for the ride and, as I had had hoped, share the costs.
It turned out the Mexican had no money at all, and was overstaying his visa. The New Yorker had money and was certainly legal, but drove me crazy anyway over next 4 days as we drove through the Mohave Desert, lit illegal campfires in the Grand Canyon and got stuck without gas in the mountains of New Mexico. Thankfully, we were able to coast dowhill to a town which seemed only to have one gas station, one person and one dog in the entire place. After 3 days of driving we reached Texas late at night. Next morning a searing sun, the kind I had last seen only in India, woke us up early. While driving later on I-10, near Sierra Blanca, next to the Mexican Border, an INS checkpoint relieved us of one of my two companions, putting him on a deportation bus to Mexico. Thankfully, he took it a lot better than the New Yorker or I did. The New Yorker went nuts and started blabbing about 'hicks' in a nearby restaurant. With guns and cattle heads on display above our heads, the clearly Texan clientele calmly regarded the dark skinned Indian and New York Jew in hawaii shirt shorts dissing their culture.
anyway, more about that trip later, in some other place (the return to California was even more exciting)...
I had hoped to read 'On the Road' and recapture the spirit of my trip, in words perhaps better than my own. I was slightly disappointed. A beat(ific) writer in the 50s probably sees and looks for different things than I did. In any case, I found the story line dull, the writing passable, and the observations on the meaning of life to be fairly meaningless. but then again, that is just me...

Award-winning actor Will Patton who lends a charged and vivid voice
Audio collections focusing on the classics must have the 50th Anniversary Edition of Jack Kerouac's ON THE ROAD, narrated by award-winning actor Will Patton who lends a charged and vivid voice to Kerouac's adventure story of two friends who make four cross-country road trips.

Kerouac's Seminal Book Still Haunts and Resonates a Half-Century Later
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.