On the Road

On the Road is a 1957 novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use. The novel is a roman à clef, with many key figures of the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee), Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx), and Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac, himself, as the narrator, Sal Paradise. The idea for On the Road, Kerouac's second novel, was formed during the late 1940s, in a series of notebooks and then typed out, on a continuous reel of paper, during three weeks in April 1951. It was published by Viking Press in 1957. The New York Times hailed the book's appearance as "the most beautifully executed, the clearest, and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac, himself, named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is." In 1998, the Modern Library ranked On the Road 55th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. Production and publication After Kerouac dropped out of Columbia University, he served on several different sailing vessels, before returning to New York to write. He met and mixed with Beat Generation figures Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Between 1947 and 1950, while writing what would become The Town and the City (1950), Kerouac engaged in the road adventures that would form On the Road. Kerouac carried small notebooks, in which much of the text was written as the eventful span of road trips unfurled. He started working on the first of several versions of the novel as early as 1948, based on experiences during his first long road trip in 1947, but he remained dissatisfied with the novel. Inspired by a 10,000-word rambling letter from his friend, Neal Cassady, Kerouac, in 1950, outlined the "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" and decided to tell the story of his years on the road with Cassady, as if writing a letter to a friend in a form that reflected the improvisational fluidity of jazz.