On The Road
(Jack Kerouac)
First published in 1957, On The Road is probably the best known of the 'Beat' novels and its author Jack Kerouac is generally seen as the Beat Generation's central figure.
Kerouac took his early inspiration from the free-spirited works of Jack London and Thomas Wolfe but realised he needed to break free from literary constraints and form his own method of expression, which he called ?spontaneous prose". This neatly mirrored the shambling nature of life on the road where life flows freely.
Like most of his writing, this startling book is largely biographical: the characters and events are closely based on those in his own wide experience of seven years of travelling around America and Mexico. The personification of the Beat spirit of adventure and the search for an alternate ?American Dream? is Dean Moriarty (based on Neal Cassady) who takes the young narrator Sal Paradise (based on Kerouac himself) on several cross-country journeys with nothing on his mind but the need to experience.
Driven by Moriarty's fierce energy, they look for ?kicks?, jazz, drugs and girls as they move from one place - or even one moment - to another with anarchic momentum. Frenetically taking in what is on offer in the cities East and West and all the way in between, they ricochet around each other's lives as well as the lives of friends, wives and lovers and wildly assorted characters as though inside an American-sized pinball machine.
To Kerouac, life on the road and the true meaning of ?Beat?was ultimately a spiritual or religious quest. What his heros achieve is hard to defne but this rhapsodic masterpiece of endless physical and metaphysical journeying struck a strong chord with the postwar American generation, and an audience looking for a bold voice from life on the fringes.
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- Pound Beat. Ezra Pound And The Beat Generation,
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