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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780140283297
ISBN number: 0140283293
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 304
Printing Date: June 01, 1999
Publishing house: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Sale Popularity Level: 4350
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
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.
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.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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I rather think On The Road is the kind of book that will either appeal to someone or it won't. I guess most books are that way. But I see so many disparaging reviews either here or in the discusion section that I wanted to start by acknowledging that point.
Personally, I loved the book enough to write a companion reader for it (The Beat Handbook: 100 Days of Kerouactions), so right up front I have a bias and thought you should know about that.
Objectively, it's important to note that most scholars agree that - contrary to what many believe - Kerouac did not write On The Road without editing it in a nonstop caffeine-enhanced frenzy. At least one scholar suggests that Kerouac wrote in three phases. First, he captured his experiences as they happened or soon after in notebooks. Second, he wrote about his experiences in letters. Third, he refined it all into his manuscripts. Even the latter he edited multiple times.
Regardless, Kerouac set forth - as he stated in his own letters - to invent a new way of writing. Most agree that he succeeded with his stream-of-consciouness style. Some say he changed the American novel.
In any event, to really enjoy On The Road as Kerouac intended, just read it. Fluently. Don't try to make sense of it intellectually at every turn. Experience the timing of his writing, how it slows down and speeds up and pauses. How it glides and stutters. How it wanders - just like our thoughts! Re-read sections. Much of it is like poetry - it's not just about the meaning but about the sound and the texture of words.
Of course, along the way enjoy the story. Keep in mind that the book involves drug use and sex and petty larceny and a whole host of other behaviors society deems "inappropriate." That was the point! It was the generation that very first rebelled against the Ozzie and Harriet culture we'd become. The beat generation experimented with living!
And Kerouac chronicled it. Better than anyone else.
On The Road is required reading for anyone interested in the beat generation.
Rated by buyers 
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As far as I can tell, this book is about girls, hitchhiking, and partying. After 100 pages and no plot in sight, I put the book down. A total waste of time.
Rated by buyers 
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As I age, look back and revisit books and states of mind, I find my aesthetic interlocutor diminishing the significance of the beats and all things beatnik (along with other things that don't apply to this review). Too much of what was beat seems in retrospect self-promotion. Certainly, Kerouac was a passionate cat, but whatever truths he offered--buddhistic and otherwise--don't fit well with the alcoholic he became, or the anti-Semitic remarks that occasionally burst out of him. Ginsberg, according to Caroline Cassidy, was a misogynist, which the underground movie Pull My Daisy seems to confirm. Kesey, who was a bridge of sorts between beats and hippies, is mightily disliked as a sef-centered creep by more than a few who knew him, including the late Abbie Hoffman. And from another angle, my daughter, who is a good and serious writer, and appreciates such as Henry Miller, picked up On the Road at my urging and could hardly read it, so shallow did she find it.
I suppose there's enough sentiment left in me from those old rebellious days of finger-snapping coffeehouse readings to give Jack three stars for now, but subsequent year, if the same retrospective critical trend continues, he might be down to two.
If you want to read something more moving, and far more accomplished, check out the following memoir of a hippie sensibility (that is, a mind on acid), one man;s intense year a youthful counterculture both influenced by and anagonistic to the hipsters (being more hot than cool, more joyous than deadpan): I Think, Therefore Who Am I?
Rated by buyers -
All I can say is that if you've read this book, you know how amazing it is... it is a classic after all! If you have not read this, go out buy it, read it, and find someone else who has not read it. It almost seems to be a book that created an underground cult. I LOVE it...
Rated by buyers -
This is a great book and really shows the discovery of youth, good and bad. What did you do right out of high school? Right out of college? Backpack across Europe? Jump in a car with friends and travel the U.S.? Most don't, most never will. I read this book years ago and really enjoyed it. We can find pleasure in things when we are in our teens and even early 20's that will never bring us that same feeling again. Simple pleasures that we get so much more out of, before the grind of the 9 to 5, the stack of bills on the table, the notes from school, the news every night on TV, politics and the view of yourself in the mirror getting older and older, takes them away, right out of your hand and you're too busy trying to stop the clock from ticking to try to get them back. This is a book that reminded me of all the times I'd felt completely carefree. What will the book mean for you? I don't know, it depends on your own interests, but it made me smile and want to go "on the road."
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