Jack KEROUAC's On the Road ... 50th Anniversary Edition

SEPTEMBER 5, 2007 is a very special day in the history of American literature. Jack Kerouac’s seminal Beat Generation classic, On the Road, was first published on this day 50 years ago. An autobiographical novel documenting the cross-country adventures of Sal Paradise and his friend Dean Moriarty, On the Road, written in a three-week typing frenzy fuelled by a constant intake of benzedrine and coffee, has been regarded as the road map for a restless generation. Kerouac was born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, U.S. His first novel, The Town and the City, was published in 1950, but it was On the Road, published by Viking in 1957, that made him known and remembered to this day. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969. Viking has published a 50th anniversary edition of On the Road. John Leland, in his homage to Kerouac, Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They’re Not What You Think) (Viking, 2007), tells you why the counterculture classic is still relevant today.