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On the Road

Realist and Literary Fiction

A 1957 novel by the American author Jack Kerouac, drawn from his own travels across the United States with Neal Cassady and others in the late 1940s. Written in a spontaneous, loosely autobiographical style and centered on the restless friendship between the narrator Sal Paradise and the charismatic Dean Moriarty, it became a defining text of the Beat Generation and an enduring emblem of postwar American countercultural wandering. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Facts
Classification
Audience
General 1
Original Language
English 1
Composed, From (Year)
1957 1
FAQs

How quickly was the first draft of On the Road written?

In three weeks in April 1951.

The first draft of what became the published novel was written in three weeks in April 1951, while Kerouac was living in New York with his second wife, Joan Haverty. The idea for the book had developed through a series of notebooks kept during the late 1940s.
Connections

Authored By

Jack Kerouac, Authors
Source On the Road (Wikipedia)

In Genre

The Novel, Genres
Source On the Road (Wikipedia)
In the Other Atlases

Original Language

Also in Language Atlas: the original language of this subject.

Originated In

Also in Geography Atlas: where this subject originated.

Source On the Road (Wikipedia)tier 2
Sources
1. On the Road (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation
  • lead section
    On the Road is a 1957 novel by American author Jack Kerouac, inspired by his travels across the United States.
  • Lead
    On the Road is a 1957 novel by American author Jack Kerouac, inspired by his travels across the United States.
  • Original language statement
    The New York Times hailed the book's appearance as "the most beautifully executed, the clearest, and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac, himself, named years ago as 'beat', and whose principal avatar he is." In 1998, the Modern Library ranked On the Road 55th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
  • Lead paragraph
    On the Road is a 1957 novel by American author Jack Kerouac, inspired by his travels across the United States. It is widely regarded as a defining work of the postwar Beat Generation, following a group of friends living for the moment against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and rebellion. The novel is a roman à clef, featuring characters based on central figures of the Beat movement.
  • Authored By: Jack Kerouac, Lead section, authorship
    On the Road is a 1957 novel by American author Jack Kerouac, inspired by his travels across the United States.
  • In Genre: The Novel, Lead section, novel genre
    On the Road is a 1957 novel by American author Jack Kerouac, inspired by his travels across the United States.
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