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On the Road

Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
On the Road follows the restless journeys of two friends across America, driven by a yearning for meaning and authentic experience. Inspired by Jack Kerouac's real-life travels with Neal Cassady, the novel blends a mix of melancholy innocence with reckless freedom, portraying a deeply compassionate and jazzy tribute to the American spirit.
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Format: Paperback / softback
$5000

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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This classic novel appeals to readers interested in American literature, beat generation culture, and tales of self-discovery and freedom.

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First published in 1957, this novel epitomized to the world the Beat philosophy. It chronicles a spontaneous and wandering life style founded both on jazz and drug-induced visions.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Jack Kerouac’s classic American novel of freedom and the search for originality that defined a generation.

“An authentic work of art.”—The New York Times

Inspired by Jack Kerouac’s adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naïveté and wild abandon and imbued with Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope—a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780140042597

Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 28 December 1976

Country: United States

Imprint: Penguin USA

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 16.0mm

Width: 128.0mm

Height: 196.0mm

Weight: 215g

Pages: 320

About the Author

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of “one vast book,” The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

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