Ann Charters

On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion.

The collection includes excerpts, chronologically arranged, from novels which make up the Legend of Duluoz. Kerouac appears as a child in Doctor Sax, as a teenager in Maggie Cassidy, as a young man in On the Road, as a road-wary traveler in Tristessa, as a committed seeker of truth in the Dharma Bums, and as a man at the end of the road in Satori in Paris.