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On the Road

By Jack Kerouac, Ann Charters (Contributor)

(618)

| eBook | 9780141912561

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Book Description

On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt WhitmaContinue

Critics

On the Road Again

In 1951, Jack Kerouac feverishly pounded out the first draft of “On the Road” in three weeks on a single huge roll of paper. This believe-it-or-not item earns a place on the heroic roster of spontaneous literary combustions — Stendhal writing “The Ch ... (read full critics)

nytimes published on Sat, 18 Sep 2010

On the Road By Jack Kerouac

To mark the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's iconic Beat classic, don't miss the audio presentation of On the Road performed by Matt Dillon. ... (read full critics)

bookpage published on Mon, 13 Sep 2010

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17 Reviews

8 people find this helpful

Kerouac is a spiritual guide for everyone who's free.

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Izabella Stardust said on Jun 8, 2007 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

6 people find this helpful

Unbeliavably boring. It is for me totally unfathomable why such collection of idle mental and geographical wanderings could became a cult for an entire generation.

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zontar said on Nov 13, 2007 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

1 person find this helpful

Boring

This book is very famous, but at the same time I found it boooring. It is diveded in four different parts, but there are no differences from one to another: the first opne could be interesting but the others are repetitive.

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feder84 said on Jul 26, 2010 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

On the road to... nowhere in particular

I realise that this book is not really about the unfolding of a journey from A to B (or more accurately a number of journeys), where the story is defined by start and end points and events in between, and the ultimate achievement of a goal - instead it is a story about characters, people and more br ... (continue)

I realise that this book is not really about the unfolding of a journey from A to B (or more accurately a number of journeys), where the story is defined by start and end points and events in between, and the ultimate achievement of a goal - instead it is a story about characters, people and more broadly a generation (the so-called 'beat' generation) who are the non-participants in the American Dream, the under-class, the 'have-nots'. The lives of the main protagonists, Sal Paradise (our narrator, Jack Karouac's alter ego) and Dean Moriarty, are defined by their itinerant, non-conformist, high speed-, alcohol- and drug- fuelled experiences between New York, Denver, San Francisco and finally Mexico City, as they search for some secret to life and happiness that is ultimately unattainable.
The style of writing is unique, energetic and rolling (like the road), but after a while I found it, like the scenery and the characters, repetitive. By the end I had run out of gas.

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Matthew Hardcastle said on Feb 28, 2012 | Add your feedback

" so in America when the sun goes down and i sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over new jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the west coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, ... (continue)

" so in America when the sun goes down and i sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over new jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the west coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in iowa i know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that god is pooh bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of dean moriarty, i even think of old dean moriarty the father we never found, i think of dean moriarty "

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kovalski said on Dec 30, 2011 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback