Part One

In part one of On the Road, Sal Paradise, the narrator, is a young writer living with his aunt in Paterson, New Jersey, during the late 1940s. Sal is writing his first novel as he recovers from a failed marriage. In the opening of part one, Sal describes how he comes to meet a charismatic, exciting drifter and con artist from Denver named Dean Moriarty. Sal's curiosity is first piqued when he reads the interesting, lively letters that Dean wrote during his stay in a New Mexico reformatory to their mutual friend Chad King. By the time Dean arrives in New York City with his child-bride, Marylou, Sal is anxious to meet him. Sal describes Dean as "trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent—a side burned hero of the snowy West." Soon after the two young men meet, Dean leaves Marylou when she files...