On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
Summary
Sal Paradise, a young writer in New York recovering from a divorce and a long illness, falls in with Dean Moriarty, a manic, charismatic ex convict who treats every cross country trip as a spiritual mission in itself, and the two crisscross America together and apart between 1947 and 1950, hitchhiking, driving stolen or borrowed cars, and working odd jobs in the wheat fields of Nebraska or the produce markets of California, always restless to keep moving. Dean marries and abandons a string of women, including Camille and Marylou, fathers children he barely supports, and burns through friendships with a self justifying energy that Sal finds by turns thrilling and exhausting; a long detour into Mexico near the novel's end leaves Sal feverish and sick, and Dean, needing to get back to a new marriage, leaves him behind there without much explanation. Back in New York, Sal has found some stability and a new partner by the time Dean shows up unannounced one last time, worn down and no longer glamorous the way he once seemed; Sal, now with somewhere else to be, cannot bring him along, and the novel ends with Sal watching Dean's figure recede and thinking simply that he will be fine, even though nothing in the book has actually shown that to be true.
Kerouac writes in long, propulsive sentences meant to mimic the improvisation of the jazz his characters worship, and the book reads fast and loose, closer to a string of vivid scenes strung on momentum than to a novel built around a plotted arc; its looseness is also its most argued over feature, since what feels like freedom to one reader can read as simple aimlessness to another.
Kerouac typed the first version of the book in three weeks in April 1951 on a single continuous roll of tracing paper taped together into what he called the scroll, feeding it through his typewriter without stopping for paragraph breaks, then spent years revising it into publishable shape, changing his friends' real names, Neal Cassady became Dean Moriarty and Allen Ginsberg became Carlo Marx, along the way.
Historical Context & Significance
Viking Press published On the Road on September 5, 1957, and Gilbert Millstein's advance review in the New York Times called it a major novel and its publication a historic occasion, comparing its cultural arrival to that of The Sun Also Rises three decades earlier. The reaction that followed split sharply: David Dempsey argued the road in the book led nowhere, Phoebe Lou Adams in the Atlantic complained that everything worth knowing about Dean was told in the book's first third, and the Los Angeles Times's Robert Kirsch allowed only that Kerouac might one day become a good writer and dismissed his subjects as the Deadbeat Generation. No literary prize took it up that year, and 1957's Pulitzer for fiction went unawarded entirely, leaving the year with no official verdict on American fiction at all, prize or otherwise.
The book's reputation grew from readers and other artists rather than from institutions: Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and Hunter S. Thompson all named it a formative influence, and Jim Irsay paid 2.43 million dollars for Kerouac's original scroll manuscript at auction in 2001, a sum that gives some sense of the distance the book has traveled since.