On the Road: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

The continent "groans" again and again. The night is too often "sad," the cities are "mad" or "wild" and "sad" some more. New York is the "edge of the continent," and San Francisco, too and sometimes they're the "rim of the world," or some similar allusion. Jack Kerouac and his friends, hanging outside New York City's Harmony Bar, would be considered drunks and losers by the standards of most. The author's muse and messiah, Neal Cassady, is a fellow too easily distracted, undisciplined and, by today's measurements, a candidate for depression medication. In the recently released "scroll" version of "On the Road," Cassady's criminal bent and complete disregard for his friends' concerns or the safety of strangers are drawn in much starker contrast than they are in the (we now know for sure) much toned-down Viking Press version of the 1950s. But it works and wonderfully so. Whatever the personal flaws of the roadgoers, and they are multiple, whatever the prosodic sins of their faithful secretary Jack, equally numerous, The Scroll is blessed with energy and truth and dynamism, a beatific rhythm and sound that hold up, even though 50 years on we've read it all before. But where what was once novel becomes cliché with the passing of time, The Scroll takes on enhanced value as snapshot of a country long-disappeared. The Scroll contains a hundred pages more than the edited "On the Road," and that's a lot of adventure and resulting ruminations, as Kerouac takes us to Denver and San Francisco, and back out to New York and down to North Carolina, back up again, and then down through Louisiana back up to San Francisco, New York again and finally through Texas to damp and sexy San Antonio before shooting through "biblical" Mexico, now gone, too. Even the "normal" people in this frantic tome, those with wives and jobs they stick with are not like us anymore, working on ships and in factories as they do, residing in company towns and city centers. The Scroll is a sweeping panorama of America and of thought beaten out on teletype paper by a guy on speed; maybe drug speed, maybe coffee, but probably something else that burned out of Kerouac like heavy kerosene and which caused his death when the last vapors rose from his being and poofed into the dusty firmament. It has politics without the jeremiads and program points, just whole manifestoes in a masterful word-stroke such as "sullen unions," a flavor and entire reality nailed to the mind's wall. "The American police are involved in psychological warfare against those Americans who don't frighten them with imposing papers and threats. There's no defense. Poor people have their lives interfered with ad infinitum by these neurotic busybodies. It's a Victorian police force; it peers out of musty windows and wants to inquire about everything, and can make crimes if the crimes don't exist to their satisfaction." It is loving landscape portraiture as in this passage laid down about Neal, his "whore wife" Luanne (meant here as flattery), and Jack's departure from New Orleans: "Port Allen -- Poor Allen -- where the river's all rain and roses in a misty pinpoint darkness and where we swung around a circular drive in yellow foglight and suddenly saw the great black body below a bridge and crossed eternity again. What is the Mississippi River -- a washed clod in the rainy night, a soft plopping from drooping Missouri banks, a dissolving, a riding of the tide down the eternal waterbed, a contribution to brown foams, a voyaging past endless vales and trees and levees down, down along, down along, by Memphis, Greenville, Eudora, Vicksburg, Natchez, Port Allen, and Port Orleans and Point of the Deltas, by Venice and the Night's Great Gulf out. So the stars shine warm in the Gulf of Mexico at night. From the soft and thunderous Carib comes electricity, and from the continental Divide where rain and rivers are decided come swirls, and the little raindrop that in Dakota fell and gathered mud and roses rises resurrected from the sea and flies on back to go and bloom again in waving mells of the Mississippi's bed, and lives again." The passage lies almost exactly at the book's midpoint; stands as strong backbone to all the word swirling before and after, a fine spine, like the Mississippi in its marriage with the landscape. Everywhere lively applications, symbols, poetry pulled from the very map that is America, multiple magic in Missouri and Mississippi, no invention with Port Orleans and Point of the Deltas, by Potash, and Venice, just the natural ordering of an evident and obvious song about the land itself. Early on in this passage the prose become unnecessary, the point made, ripe for a Sixth Avenue editor's pen. But gripped by the author's sweaty hand, we are yanked along, pointed here and there on the keyboard toward ecstatic sites he has taken the time to see for us. Can the Carib be both soft and thunderous? Does the oscillation between them make electricity? On paper it does. Is there such a thing as a mell or does his lazy resort to something that sings make it go down so much easier, and isn't that part of the job? Mell is a swell on the Mississippi and we know that, even if we didn't before. It is not easy to sift through all the postmodern swill that has come after and still be awed at the pure audacity of Kerouac; the audacity to make up words, to appear at his New York editor's office sweating and stinking of chemical ooze with a manuscript written on 120 feet of rolled paper demanding respect of The Scroll as if it were plumbed from Dead Sea depths. So goes it with the aspiring philosopher whom, even if he is a bum, still philosophizes for all of us and not just for those of high brow and intentions: "death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced -- tho we hate to admit it -- in death. But who wants to die. More of this later." Beyond bum philosophy or travel writing The Scroll renders social commentary still relevant today: "On the sidewalk characters swarmed. Everybody was looking at everybody else. It was the end of the continent no more land. Somebody had tipped America like a pinball machine and all the goofballs had come rolling to LA in the southwest corner. I cried for all of us. There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we'll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it's been. Until then there is a lugubrious seriousness I love in all of this." There's that "end of the continent" bit while "sadness and madness" appear elsewhere in a vignette of Kerouac's entitled "October In the Railroad Earth," as "end of the land sadness end of the land gladness" not precisely alike, but essentially the same literary trick. Yet if you're hip to all of this, if you can dig it and know time, then it's not lack of imagination so much as your favorite band playing the same songs at a second show. And Kerouac likened his writing to "blowing," which is what the trumpeters and saxophoners of his time did, in fact, do. And then there's Neal; stripped of Dean Moriarity's mask and draped in a legend Cassady came to embody for three generations of misspent youths, stealing four cars at a roadhouse party outside Denver, denied entry into the homes of kith and kin alike, boy to his father's bum and disappeared dad, wrangler, brakeman, seducer of everybody else's girlfriends (and boyfriends), absentee father himself. Says "Naked Lunch" author William Burroughs of Cassady when they visit him in the Louisiana swamps, "He seems to be headed for his ideal fate, which is compulsive psychosis dashed with a jigger of psychopathic irresponsibility and violence." Pretty smart fellow Bill Burroughs, as were they all, in spite of their nasty habits. Cassady floats free of all preconceived notions regarding expected behavior, free of the bars others attempt to bind him with through holy judgments...part-time N.Y. hipster and happy pervert to Kerouac's ambiguous French-Catholic curiosities. "He lived with Diane in a coldwater flat in the East Seventies. When he came home at night he took off all his clothes and put on a hiplength Chinese silk jacket and sat in his easy chair to smoke a waterpipe loaded with tea. These were his coming-home pleasures: together with a deck of dirty cards. 'Lately I've been concentrating on this deuce of diamonds. Have you noticed where her other hand is? I'll bet you can't tell. Look long and try to see.' He wanted to lend me this deuce of diamonds, which depicted a tall mournful fellow and a lascivious sad whore on a bed trying a position. 'Go ahead man, I've used it many times!'" Drunken romantics bound early to your graves. Who should purchase your peddlings? A dank Detroit theater is no palace at 4 a.m. and an alley is an alley is an alley in the crappy part of a marginal Texas town. Or is it? Throwing down your challenge, your example was enjoyment. "Man can you dig the beauty and kicks!" "We wandered out and negotiated several dark mysterious blocks. Innumerable houses hid behind verdant almost jungle-like yards we saw glimpses of girls in front rooms, girls on porches, girls in the bushes with boys. "I never knew this mad San Antonio! Think what Mexico'll be like. Lessgo! Lessgo!" Yet for all its ebullience, "On the Road" is but a marginally successful search for joy that, at bottom, asserts something is not right in these sojourners nor in the America which spawned them. "Looking at snapshots of Cassady's children," Kerouac writes, "I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth and well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness of the riot, or our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. Juices inform the world, children never know." Nightmare and dream sit on different sides of the same coin and to know one, you must be familiar with the other. The extension of the Mexico trip, trimmed to a classical dénouement in the edited version, renders the American break with an organic world wrought by the big bomb drops on Japan. It is mentioned vaguely, as if to do so more emphatically might conjure another nuclear massacre, but in this passage we hear it and understand that, for all their rebellion and dissociation, the roadgoers are tainted by food from the same poisoned factory farm. The indigenous peoples they saw, "knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment. For when destruction comes to the world people will stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where it all began and where Adam was suckled and taught to know." Jack and Neal and the third wheel rolling with them are no heroes. They are car escapees from the psychic slaughter unleashed in their homeland, a sudden clanking folly from America with its three broken bozos inside. And the choice has been the same for half a century now: to be with them or against them. Lead the way you lost and lonely bozos.

Note about the kindle version - it crashes Paperwhites, but is great on a Fire tablet: -------------- The kindle version of this book (On the Road: The Original Scroll) crashes and freezes when I read it on a Paperwhite. I tried it on two different Paperwhites (one is being returned for screen issues, the other is its replacement) and it did the same thing on both. Towards the end of the book, after reading 10 pages or so, the screen turns white and sometimes launches a restart and other times just freezes for a long time. Customer service had me "permanently delete" the book as a way of solving the issue, but after they restored the purchase, the problem persists. Fortunately, I was reading it on a fire tablet as well which, as I explain below, is almost the only way in which the book should be read. ----------------------------------------------- I first read this book (as originally published, not the scroll) as required reading in an English class. Unfortunately, I remember pretty much zero about it, so my guess is that I either skimmed it or read the SparkNotes version. If that sounds familiar, then I urge you to revisit this book and really, honestly, actually read it. The older version of the book I "read" used pseudonyms for the Beat writer characters who appeared in it. Even if I had had any idea who William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and other Beat writers were at the time, I likely wouldn't have been able to figure out which character was which. In this version, the pseudonyms are gone, the characters are who they are, often described in brutal and uncompromising terms, which frankly makes for a far more interesting read. [A word of caution, however, is in order - maybe several - owing to the casual use of disparaging language, as well as to the inclusion of material that was cut from the originally published version because it was deemed to be too pornographic.] I highly recommend reading it on a device that allows page scrolling. The reason for this is that Kerouac wrote the manuscript for this book on a single piece of paper, which in this case was a 120-foot-long scroll that he fashioned by taping pieces of paper together. It was typed single-spaced, without margins or paragraph breaks, so it's a rather remarkable thing to be able to read it just as he wrote it. (Just as an FYI, my kindle paperwhite does not have page-scrolling capability nor do most other kindle readers as I have been told, neither does the kindle app on my laptop, but the kindle fire accommodates page scrolling, as does the kindle app on my phone.) Whichever way you choose to read the book will be worth it. It's an insider's view into the world of the ' highest echelons of the Beat writers - their young lives and how they became who they eventually became in spite of their numerous personal flaws. It's also incredible look at America in the late 1940s from Kerouac's point of view as a hitchhiker who goes cross-country with barely two nickels to rub together and never knowing what the new day or next mile will hold. It was somewhat amazing to realize that people could hook up with their friends in completely strange cities, and even out in the wilds of Texas, without having cell phones! This book is shot through with incredibly beautiful passages. Of traveling through California's central valley, he writes: "Soon it got dusk, a grape dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. I stuck my head out the window and took deep breaths of the fragrant air. It was the most beautiful of all moments." The book is also very funny which stems, I think, from Kerouac's self-deprecating honesty about the often crazy and improbable situations in which he finds himself over and over again, as well as from his descriptions of people and places that he lays out as just he sees them. But no matter what was happening, I found myself completely wrapped up in the narrative of Kerouac's travels and his travails, and by the weird charm of Kerouac himself. This is a book well worth reading, or re-reading, especially if "the original scroll" was not the version that was read before. It has a permanent place on my shelf of personal classics. I do not recommend reading it on kindle readers because of my very frustrating experience with that.

I started reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and about time, you might say. All my life, I had expected this book to be a sort of hysterical gospel of the beat generation. In a way, it is, but above all it’s a hymn to the United States, its vastness, its sadness, its poetry and melancholy. It’s got something of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie with, in the background, Ennio Moricone’s music for Once upon a time in the West. I’m glad I first went from Arkansas to Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, then New Mexico and Arizona before I read this book. I can taste the wide open vistas, the mesmerizing monotony of endless roads over perfectly flat land, the sense of emptiness in this under populated country. Also, I understand somewhat better Aaron Copeland’s Fanfare for the common Man. All so beautiful and heartbreaking ! Like Kerouac, but under much more comfortable circumstances, I enjoyed the impact of unexpected encounters : an Indian in New Mexico, for instance, at a service station. He’d noticed my Little Rock, Razorback T-shirt, and we started talking. “I just spent several years in Little Rock” he said. “Now, I’m going home” : a simple statement, as moving as a haiku. You could never be friends with these people ; here now, gone a few seconds later, yet they stay with you all your life. Kerouac’s style has a lot to do with the fascination one quickly feels for the novel. Style can turn an ordinary story into a magic one. Here, sentences are clear, yet enhanced now and then by poetic touches : a misleading simplicity, and no mean feat. The major drawback lies in Kerouac’s obsession with booze, beer and getting drunk. Characters in the novel - including the main character - are always complaining that they are short of money, and it’s very true that they are not exactly rolling in it, but if they didn’t drink so much, they would have enough to get by, most of the time. The story takes place in 1947. By the time I went to live in North America (Canada is the same) it hadn’t changed. For me, the year was 1963. If a man managed to take a girl to a motel with him, he also had to bring in a bottle of whiskey. Apparently, it’s still like that. What a sad, sad outlook on sex ! Getting drunk on cheap booze instead of getting drunk on each other ! When the body is fighting with 6 shots of Bourbon, orgasms are reduced to the mere release of biological tensions instead of the last movement in a grand symphony of sensations and emotions. In California, Jack meets a lovely Mexican girl with blue eyes, which prompts an old farmer to say that, at some point, “the bull jumped over the fence.” You just know that their affair is not going to last, even if it keeps on for a few weeks. Jack Kerouac’s talent means that, as a reader, you are more in love with the girl than the author ever was. There is great sadness at their parting (there is great sadness throughout the book), but love, real love, deep love is never an element of the story, and that makes it even more poignant. On the Road is a drifting odyssey of self-centred people who are not even aware that they are self-centred. It’s an ode to complicated losers.

Jack Kerouac's On the Road details Sal Paradise's (Kerouac's) adventures with some of his real-life friends and acquaintances as he travels around America during post-war 1940. Hailed as a definitive Beat Generation novel, it chronicles Sal's exploration for meaning, self-identity and independence. The search for self-realization becomes a repeated theme throughout, as Sal and Dean experience America through travel and adventure. On the positive side, I found the travel aspect to the novel compelling and interesting. Kerouac's description of the places and the people make the journeys very authentic and real. It's clear from reading that he is excited about the prospects of being on the move. I think readers can readily identify with Sal and Dean's experiencing the world through a road trip, meeting people along the way, and making connections. Sal wants to make his way in the world by connecting to the people in the places he visits and the road itself is symbolic of that freedom and expression. The spirit of adventure, going out on the open road and experiencing the many diverse cities and town, and being a part of the world is something that Kerouac does manage to eloquently capture. However, the primary characters were unlikable and the ideas and philosophies projected were rather shallow. Sal has only flickering glimpses into any deep perspective about what this whole sense of self-discovery is and what life experiences ultimately mean to him; he is way too busy writing in a rambling, mile-a-minute fashion that catalogues everything and every "kick" without giving much substance to the moment. I waited for a big revelation at the conclusion, but never really got one. Sure, there are seldom moments where it appears that Sal is pushing away the world of wild, reckless abandon that Dean promotes and settling down to a more stable life, but these moments are rather fleeting and minimal. Sal's inspiration primarily comes through his idolization of Dean. Dean appears to be the poster child for the irresponsible, immature con-man. He flakes on his friends, cheats on his wife (or wives) repeatedly, has illegitimate children on a whim, constantly is in and out of prison for breaking the law, and looks for others to bail him out of trouble. He is the ultimate man-child, never wanting to grow up. It was difficult to understand how Sal worshiped this guy. Much of the book's appeal comes through its associations with the Beat Generation and the visions this movement projects, but in the end I just couldn't readily identify with On the Road or its characters. Too much cool hipster bravado with little depth.

BOOK ONE:- Long before Snyder philosophized on a future Rucksack Revolution and introduced old Jack K. and thus an entire generation to Buddhism, turning him on to his whole post-artist bhikku phase chasing after a newly redefined IT of ecstatic joy for pure being (and yabyum--lots and lots of yabyum), and even longer before Jack abandoned everything he loved in order to drown himself in Catholicism-induced despair and alcoholism over a 10-year span right up to his ugly cross-haunted death, he was hopping along, following (the impressionable, naïve fool) the care-free and womanizing Neal Cassady across America time after time, living and documenting from his (Neal's) side--thankfully leaving out his own personal biases and Catholic beliefs, or at least keeping them subtle, on the down-low, and cetera--creating what he'd later (briefly) refer to as his pre-enlightenment story in On the Road. I almost wish now I skipped the original published edition and just waited for the scroll ed. to get an official 50th anniversary release, b/c this thing is a beast, infinitely superior to the bowdlerized, boring mess (comparatively, that is; the original pub. ain't all that bad--and am I alone on never liking Jack's pseudonyms?) that's held such a profound influence over American youth for the past 50 years, which dropped out much of Kerouac's point, of bringing the reader with him, Cassady & co. "on the road," you could say--since the text being one massive paragraph with justified alignment creating the appearance of a road, hur hur, and I know my using that for this post is like, super cheesy, but this is how I get my kicks. It's just a bummer they didn't publish the scroll initially, b/c Lucien Carr's dog Potchky ate the last few pages' worth of scroll b/w rejection and final publication, leaving the scroll hanging midsentence. BOOK TWO:- I'm of the school that sees On the Road as a celebration of life and everything in it rather than a depressing elegy; I believe Kerouac was very much aware of his own naïveté, that his own romantic visions at the end of the tunnel--er, road--are always just that: romantic visions: never to be. He'll always be building up that excitement and heading for another golden opportunity poppin' bennies and scouring the land for faceless beauties to pick up and live off of like the sexist `50s icons they all were and new jobs new opportunities new faces new experiences and jazz-club freakouts, the IT he and his gang are always going on and on about before dropping everything for another dream and another escape down the road. But hey, a guy's gotta live somehow, and THIS. IS. LIFE. The only part where I've always even back in high school felt his seeking of life seemed to slump and hit the rocks, just plain ol' get boring as fudge, is when he hooks up with the sweet little Latina beauty Bea and settles down working the cotton fields for far too long and dreaming about being a Mexican himself. BOOK THREE:- This time round all the names of Jack's friends and acquaintances are back to the REAL, the dear old aunt he was always ripping money off of is back to being his dear old mother he was always ripping money off of and all the downplayed (homo)sexuality is now THERE in our faces as much as it was in Jack's when Neal and Allen loved one another one couch over or when Jack locked himself in a bathroom with Neal banging away from behind some stranger's rump on the other side--and it's these scenes I'm happy Jack's left out his own Catholic beliefs b/c in truth, in actual life he was disgusted by it, so whew! I'm happy Jack took the backseat and just lived through these trips as a 2-dimensional body for the reader to occupy. Sometimes, knowing the future histories for these characters, the truth that's now ringing so strongly on Jack's words adds this eerie layer to their interactions, and perhaps I'm mostly talking about Bill Burroughs and Joan Vollmer here, this deep and psychotic love they had for one another. And yeah, yeah, yeah, the sexism is still here, and all the girls are still cardboard sex objects on the sidelines for Jack and Neal's amusement, to marry and pop a few kids out of--b/c that's what just how it went in the `50s--and I figure that makes this not the most appealing book for ladies altho still a fascinating look at a culture gone-by and the troubled mind of Kerouac before he lost it all coming down off the aptly-named Desolation Peak in '58 and commencing his Catholic/alcoholic self-abasement and turning into a big dingle dangle of a human being, disconnecting himself from the Beats and from the hippies (and the Beats that became hippies, e.g., Ginsberg and Cassady) that were about to pop up swinging ragged copies of The Dharma Bums and adding a political edge to the Beat way of life, and this copy, this ORIGINAL SCROLL ed. of On the Road is so much jazzier than the one we've all known since '57, it rolls right along so much smoother and the ups and downs of his journey and our journey zoom past and we don't really care w/out the chapter-break interruptions of before b/c we're just moving right along with Kerouac on to the next high. BOOK FOUR:- Even tho I originally read On the Road in high school and didn't much care for it (or Kerouac) until I picked up Dharma Bums, it influenced me in such a special way as it influenced so many others, getting me to get up off my lazy bum from in front of the old computer and take the hand of whatever friend I'm near at the time and go off on some crazy hitch-hiking adventure across America once or twice a year since 2007, first waking up early one morning, having never been far from the coop on my own, and saying to a friend very seriously "Hey hey, hey, let's go to Mexico, check out Boy's Town?" and as a first trip it went exactly like Kerouac's always did with a depressing anticlimax waiting for us at the end, disappointment and confusion, but any trip since like when I danced all the way to Arizona and all over getting drunk with a Polish man suffering from diarrhea and an English backpacker and a bunch of students from my college in TX at Lowell Observatory and getting stuck in Mund's Park for hours sunburned to hell and back and getting on to the Arcosanti hippie commune et cetera, overall a much more exciting trip than my first Kerouac-inspired exploration of life and reality and naïveté, just as my last two have also been a big blast--w/ many ups and downs, yes, but a blast nonetheless. BOOK FIVE:- On the Road's a book that's needed to be experienced by everyone at a young age, and I'm hoping now that the ORIGINAL SCROLL v.--THE SUPERIOR VERSION--has been released, it'll be a replacement for the orig. publication, even if the jazzy famous line about the MAD ONES is much weaker this time around we're still getting at the TRUTH of the trip, the FREEDOM behind America, on the road, celebratory or elegiac feelings American, however you take Kerouac's poetic journeys from coast to coast and down into the heart of his romanticism and the Mexican dream and the inevitable and incomparable Old Neal Cassady Letdowns and Breakups, the 100% ----- I shambled after as usual as I've been doing all my life after people that interest me, because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing., but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night. ----- [Written October 2009 for LibraryThing. Since then, can't say my adoration for even Kerouac's best stuff has kept with me.]

Commonly known as the "Beatnik handbook," On the Road became the literary guide to a generation of restless, disenchanted youths. Its author, Jack Kerouac, became a co-creator of the "beat Generation," along with other American writers including William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg. The beats were focused on the highs and passions of life during an era of conformity and straight-laced philosophy. Written in just three weeks, One the Road was typed on eight long sheets of tracing paper in 1951. The author taped the sheets together and rolled them up into a continuous 120 foot scroll. The roll was typed single-spaced, without margins or paragraph breaks. When the book was finally published in 1957, editors reformatted the book into standard form, and some of the more colorful elements of the story were removed. Viking Press released this special edition of the book in its original typed form and content. Despite the lack of chapters or paragraph breaks, I found the formatting helped me read at the rushed pace of Kerouac's story. While it may be intriguing to myself, and other die-hard fans, it might not appeal to the traditional reader. Kerouac also had a habit of writing two "wordsas" one occasionally, but don't let that bother you. This first draft is dripping with creative energy and originality. On the Road is a memoir of the author's trips to meet up with his friends across the continental United States. When the final book was published, the names of all those involved were changed for various reasons, including legality. Now in its original form, the book has become more personalized for those of us familiar with the people he was writing about (all soon-to-be famous 60's icons). Throughout the story, Kerouac describes his desire and need for a new generation to break free from the confinement of fall-in-line life. As you read through the various events, the tone of rebellious freedom of expression is easily felt. Jack represented a generation that thought "the only thing to do was go," searching for personal freedom and living life to the fullest. Kerouac is truly an amazing story-teller. His writing style is extremely vivid. It almost makes you feel like you are sitting next to him on the back of a flat-bed truck, flying down the highway at 90 miles an hour. You can smell the clean night air and imagine the wind blowing through your hair as you travel onward, searching for a state of higher being. Allen Ginsberg and Neil Cassidy receive the majority of Kerouac's attention throughout the story. He was fascinated by their counter-culture lifestyles (Ginsberg was openly homosexual), and saw profound importance in their lives. In some ways, On the Road is an observational book. A book that looks at the lives of people who stand out against the norm. Kerouac puts it best when he writes, "the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing ... but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night." The highlights of the book are Kerouac's deeply emotional observations, and reports of his comrades antics across a nation ripe for change. I found One the Road to be extremely profound. It is a book that will pull you into the story, and make your imagination run at the wild pace of the author's writing. Kerouac's stream of consciousness writing form is exciting and provocative. This book will challenge the way you look at life, and remind you that some of the most important things that will ever happen to you, could be happening right now. Reading this work in its originally intended form added to the artistic nature of the overall experience. I highly recommend this version to anyone who enjoys reading about how others perceive life.

A great book, and the essay by Malcolm Cowley is one of the best about that generation.

Oh man was this a difficult book to get through! But I knew I had to read it in order to understand more about the Beat Generation, which is the generation that influenced the hippie movement/generation, and I am a hippie, and Jack Kerouac was one of the leaders of the Beat Generation, and his book “On the Road” made him a famous Beat icon. And not only that, but Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” is considered “The Beatnik Handbook.” So I absolutely had to read it in order to understand what influenced the hippie movement/generation, since I’m a hippie myself. And what it is, is Jack Kerouac’s unfiltered, semi-autobiographical account of his wild cross-country road trips across late-1940s America with his friends Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. Typed over three weeks in 1951 on a single continuous 120-foot roll of teletype paper, the book captures the restless energy of post-WWII youth culture. It charts the group's frantic travels from New York to San Francisco and Mexico, fueled by jazz, late-night conversations, open highways, and a desperate search for an authentic meaning of life, plus freedom. Freedom from the rigid structure, confinement, and day to day grind of normal mainstream society at that time, and searching instead, in a rebellious freedom of expression, for personal freedom, as well the meaning of life, plus just living life to its fullest, which the normal, mainstream society at that time didn’t allow you to do at all. And unlike the famous 1957 published version, the “On the Road: The Original Scroll” uses the real names of Kerouac and his friends rather than pseudonyms. It retains the original, unedited "spontaneous prose" style with no paragraph breaks, restoring previously censored scenes involving explicit sexuality, drug use, and a darker, more realistic look at the chaotic Beat lifestyle, as Jack Kerouac puts it “…the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time...” Finally, even though it’s tedious reading “On the Road: The Original Scroll” I believe is essential reading—for anyone who read the original published text and thought it was a bit too manicured, but as well as for anyone interested in the Beat Generation, anyone who was alive during the Beat Generation, and anyone who’s a hippie/free spirit, since the Beat Generation is what influenced the hippie movement/generation.

Julklapp till min dotter!

Written as it would have been spoken in 1940s American we learn of Sal’s travels across America and into Mexico with his friends, often with little to no money, a fascinating recollection of Jack Kerouac’s own travels. The way it’s written takes a bit of getting used to, but I loved it!

良い

Arrived in good condition and is supposed to be a really good read.

Pages are not properly binded. Alternate pages were jot aligned