Sal Paradise meets Dean Moriarty and spends the next few years crossing and recrossing the country — New York to Denver to San Francisco, down to Mexico City, back again, in borrowed cars and on buses, with no money, chasing whatever Dean is chasing. It’s barely fiction; everybody in it is somebody, with Dean being Neal Cassady. Kerouac drafted it in three weeks in 1951 on a hundred-and-twenty-foot roll of paper so he wouldn’t have to stop to change sheets, then spent six years getting it published. The prose runs hot and the book made postwar restlessness into an American style.
On the Road