synopsis:

'On the Road' is the story of two young men, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, who travel frantically back and forth across the American continent seeking thrills.

The book is divided into four parts. in the first part Sal Paradise the narrator first meets Dean Moriarty and they travel from New York to Denver to meet up with a group of Beat friends to party and then on to San Francisco. In the second part they travel from Virginia to New Orleans to meet up with a friend Old Bull Lee and then travel on to San Francisco. In part three Sal hitches from New York to San Francisco and there meets up with Dean. Here they party to jazz and then travel back to New York. In the fourth part they travel from Denver to Mexico.this book is about the heavy heady friendship between Sal and Dean, about mad escapades, about drinking and drugs and beautiful descriptions of jazz, about womanising and being a bad husband. above all else it is about finally attaining 'IT'. the moment of ecstatic bliss that Dean devotes his life to pursuing.

This novel is actually a thinly veiled account of Kerouac's own life in the late 1940s, when he fell under the spell of a charismatic drifter named Neal Cassady (represented by Moriarty in the novel). Every episode in the novel was inspired by real-life events.

on this book:

The literary movement known as the Beat Generation exploded into American consciousness with two books in the late 1950s. The first, 'Howl and Other Poems' (see "And shocks of hospitals and jails and wars..." and "Moloch whose Soul is electricity...") by Allen Ginsberg, was published in 1956. The book achieved notoriety when poet and bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti went to trial for selling it in San Francisco. The second book had an even more profound cultural effect when it was published. Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road' was viewed as nothing less than a manifesto for the Beat Generation.'on the road', which would probably be considered rather tame today, shocked readers in 1957 with its depiction of drug use and promiscuous sex. Many critics attacked the work as evidence of the increasing immorality of American youth. Other critics saw it as a groundbreaking work of originality. American readers, fascinated with the bohemian lifestyle of the characters, turned the novel into a bestseller.