On the Road
(Jack Kerouac)

Jack Kerouac is known as one of the foremost authors of the beat generation. He attended private school and received a football scholarship to Columbia University. Rather than completing school, he met Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William Burroughs and joined the merchant marines.

“On the Road” is based on the actual cross-country trek Kerouac made with Neal Cassady. Kerouac bases his characters on many of his real life friends who are also beat-generation writers, such as Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty), Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx) and William Burroughs (Bull Lee).

Kerouac himself is, of course, main character Sal Paradise. Kerouac wished to change the face and structure of literature by infusing his own style which was decidedly different than authors to come before him. His writing was poetic and rambling, with some paragraphs taking up entire pages and some sentences being an entire stream of consciousness that runs together.

The setting of the novel is during the late 1940’s- early 1950’s, just past the great depression and before the Civil Rights movement, which was a calm time in the history of the United States.

The novel expresses a time when the young adults of America were coming into their own and beginning to care about the world around them and the injustice of it all. The novel was written more than fifty years ago but reflects a mindset in the youth of the nation that stil exists today, and it gives young people something to relate to in a world that is constantly changing though not always for the better.