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  • Published: 31 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241552643
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $39.99

On the Road




Jack Kerouac's Great American Novel, now in a delightful new Clothbound Classics edition

On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion.

  • Published: 31 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241552643
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $39.99

Other books in the series

About the author

Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. In 1947, enthused by bebop, the rebel attitude of his friend Neal Cassidy, and the throng of hobos, drug addicts and hustlers he encountered in New York, he decided to discover America and hitchhhike across the country. His writing was openly autobiographical and he developed a style he referred to as 'spontaneous prose' which he used to record the experiences of the Beat Generation. Among his many novels are On the Road, Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums and Big Sur. He died in 1969.

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Praise for On the Road

The most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as "beat"

The New York Times

Pop writing at its best. It changed the way I saw the world, making me yearn for fresh experience

Hanif Kureishi, Independent on Sunday

On the Road sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso machines, and also sent countless kids on the road

William Burroughs
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