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Author name: Jack Kerouac

: On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition
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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780670063260
ISBN number: 0670063266
Label: Viking Adult
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: August 16, 2007
Publishing house: Viking Adult
Sale Popularity Level: 5472
Studio: Viking Adult



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Editor's Notes and Comments:

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

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 very 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 very 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 very 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)






Customer Reviews
User popularity level: out of 5 stars

Rated by buyers 4 out of 5 stars - Passionate, Poetic, and Nihlistic
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 off 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 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.


Rated by buyers 3 out of 5 stars - 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 subsequent 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, subsequent 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...



Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - 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.


Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - Kerouac's Seminal Book Still Haunts and Resonates a Half-Century Later
In commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of its very 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.


Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - Yass, Yass, you should read this and explode.
Let me starting by noting that this was the very first time I've ever read this wonderful tome. You can't be around literature or even modern American culture without hearing the name Jack Kerouac, but I had never actually sat down and read this book.

It took me a few chapters to "get into it" in terms of the style. But after a while, I couldn't wait to get home from work and read a few more chapters, and savor the goodness. I LOVED the narrative, and the stream of consciousness style added to the prose. I've since read a bit on Kerouac and his style and his friends (Wikipedia is a good place to start), and this isn't the sloppy, lazy manifesto it is often made out to be in today's times. Kerouac knew exactly what he was doing, and it was beautiful. I'm not going to summarize the story, because you probably already know it, but I will say that I wept at the end because I was touched, and because I was truly sad to say good-bye to this book.

As others have clearly noted--there isn't much else "special" about the book in terms of it being an "Anniversary edition." There is NYT review included from when the book was published, and while a nice read, that is the only "extra" you get. The jacket cover is nice, and the hardcover looks like something you might hold on to as opposed to maybe a paperback. Beyond that, if you already have a hardcover version of this wonderful book, you won't be missing much by skipping this edition.

Kerouac's prose really buries itself into your subconscious, and when your friends wonder what the hell you are talking about, remind them of what you are reading. I'm sorry that my prose falls short in capturing the joy, the utter joy, I experienced when reading this book. If you have not read it yet, you could do much worse than this.

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