On the Road

On the Road is the second novel published by the American-born French-Canadian author Jack Kerouac. The principle themes are travel, self-fulfilment, drugs, sex, jazz and a search for spiritual and physical comfort. It was published after Kerouac's first and more conventional novel, The Town and the City. Kerouac wrote a novel before either of these titled The Sea Is My Brother, which he disapproved of and therefore did not wish to see published.

On the Road was written in 1951 and published in 1957. It chronicles the real-life travels of Jack Kerouac and his friend Neal Cassady in Mexico and the rest of North America. In the book, as in Kerouac's other novels which depicted real people, he gave pseudonymns to his characters in order to prevent accusations of libel He refers to himself as Sal Paradise and to Neal Cassady as Dean Moriaty.

The novel is the first to use Kerouac's own developed style of writing which he called 'spontaneous prose'. This was a style which broke with literary conventions and adopted a sentimental, highly descriptive tone which, as one critic put it, "swings to the rhythym of jazz". Many of Kerouac's sentences in the novel are very long, poetical, highly quotable and lyrical. Kerouac wrote the bulk of the novel in three weeks, but spent six years sporadically editing the text.

On the Road is a central text in the Beat movement and was also influential in the development of the hippie subculture.

In a drunken interview years after the novel was published, Kerouac seemed to dismiss the novel, saying "I was young then" and waving his hand as if to imply he regarded the work as immature. However, many interviews which Kerouac took part in towards the end of his life (he died in 1969) demonstrate that he was suffering from the effects of a life-time of drinking. He would later die as a result of this alcohol abuse.

On the Road was adapted into a film in 2012, to the general disapproval of devout fans.