On the Road

Jack Kerouac

About 4 pages (1,108 words)

On the Road Summary

On the Road

Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel was a mostly autobiographical travelogue of cross-country trips that Kerouac took during the late 1940s. On the Road's characters were thinly-disguised Beat luminaries, including Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Kerouac himself who—as narrator Sal Paradise—reflected the American fascination with road travel. The road's attraction is expressed throughout America's literature, popular culture, and twentieth-century life. On the Road fostered an alternative view of American life, preceding the counterculture of the 1960s; this unintended effect on Kerouac's part was partially responsible for his reclusiveness during his later years.

The book covers four road trips, mainly between New York and San Francisco, with several stops in Denver, and detours into Chicago, New Orleans, Virginia, and Mexico. The catalyst for the book was Neal Cassady, a mutual friend of Kerouac's and Ginsberg's, whose character was named Dean Moriarty. A fast-talking, charismatic womanizer from Denver, Cassady had a love of joyriding in stolen cars, which put him through Denver's reform schools. In On the Road, Sal idolizes Dean (as Kerouac idolized Cassady) as a swaggering, cowboy-like man of action: "(Dean's criminality) was a wildyea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains."

Kerouac's book sparked controversy by featuring the underside of American life in the 1950s: frenetic travel, hit-and-run romances, bop jazz, liquor, marijuana, all-night diners, and hitchhiking. The book begins with Sal, the novelist-to-be who lives with his aunt in New Jersey, travelling to Denver to see Dean. This trip initiates a series of cross-country trips by car, bus, and hitchhiking. One memorable sequence finds Dean and Sal travelling east from Denver to Chicago in a Cadillac they are hired to drive. Making the trip in 17 hours, the car makes it to Chicago in worse shape than when it left from Denver.

The actual writing of the book provided On the Road with a built-in legend. Kerouac loved promoting the story about how, in 1951, he wrote the book in three weeks, typing continuously onto a 120-foot roll of teletype paper while on benzedrine. Although the story is true, in actuality Kerouac began On the Road in November 1948, producing several versions in between then and the completion of his manuscript in 1951. The teletype roll was "the outcome of a fastidious process of outlining, chapter drafting, and trimming—begun long before April of 1951," according to Douglas Brinkley in the Atlantic Monthly.

The impetus for the continuous roll developed out of Kerouac's dissatisfaction with his early manuscripts. Kerouac wrote, in excerpted diaries published in the Atlantic Monthly, that "All along I've felt 'Road' was not enough for a full-scale effort of my feelings in prose: too thin, too hung up on unimportant characters, too unfeeling. I have the feelings but not the proper vehicle as yet." Conventional prose failed to capture the exhilaration that Kerouac felt for the open road. In 1950, he experienced an epiphany after receiving a letter from Cassady that some scholars call "The Joan Letter." A thousand-word rambling confessional, Cassady's letter described his visit to his hospitalized girlfriend Joan after her suicide attempt, and a sexual episode that required his escape by climbing out of a window. Neal's autobiographical style "convinced Kerouac that the best way to write his own novel," wrote biographer Ann Charters in Kerouac, "was to tell the story of his trips cross-country with Cassady as if he were writing a letter to a friend, using first-person narration." Kerouac soon outlined his style in the "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose," which were guidelines for a form that reflected the improvisational fluidity of a jazz musician: "Blow as deep as you want—write as deeply, fish as far down as you want … then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaning."

Published on September 5, 1957, with a second printing scheduled 15 days later, the book was on the best-seller list for five weeks late that year. By the 1990s, the book's sales had reached 3 million copies. On the Road's auspicious reception was deceptive; Kerouac would later be savaged by reviewers. Upon its release, the New York Times heralded On the Road as "an authentic work of art," but the following Sunday, in its regular review section, the newspaper panned it. Kerouac was attacked for his aesthetic philosophy: Truman Capote quipped that Kerouac's fiction was not writing but typing. Other reviewers were scandalized by the book's spotlight on characters who were drifters and misfits. The Washington Post dismissed On the Road as a chronicle of "the frantic fringe," while Time magazine vilified the book for its "degeneracy."

While literature's self-appointed guardians viewed On the Road as a barbarian storming the gates of literature's manor, they ignored the book's deep connection to uniquely American themes. "Whenever spring comes to New York," wrote Kerouac in his misunderstood book, "I can't stand the suggestions of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I've got to go. So I went." The automobile is deeply ingrained in twentieth-century American life. "Long drives and long drivers," proclaimed Car & Driver magazine in 1995, "will be part of us while roads and automobiles still exist. The elemental urge to climb into a favorite automobile and blast away, unfettered, toward a distant destination lies deep within us all." On the Road recalled the Mississippi travels of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and the fascination with the road in the poetry of Walt Whitman.

Kerouac became a precursor to the writers of the 1960s and 1970s—like Norman Mailer, Hunter Thompson, and Tom Wolfe—who were active participants in the stories they covered. By the 1990s, reviewers began to favorably reappraise On the Road: "Kerouac's work represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation," declared the New York Times in 1995. For many readers, however, the emotional response to On the Road will always remain foremost in their judgment: "No book," Ann Charters simply stated, "has ever caught the feel of speeding down the broad highway in a new car, the mindless joyousness of 'joyriding' like On the Road."