One day I was hanging around the campus and Chad and Tim Gray told me Dean was staying in a cold-water pad in East Harlem, the Spanish Harlem. Then news came that Dean was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery.

At one point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty. I was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew.

First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who'd shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform school. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. Before that I'd often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. The novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. 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. Important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named Hailed it as 'the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most When the book was originally released, The New York Times After several film proposals dating from 1957, the book was finally made into a film, On the Road (2012), produced by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by Walter Salles. The idea for On the Road, Kerouac's second novel, was formedĭuring the late 1940s in a series of notebooks, and then typed out on aĬontinuous reel of paper during three weeks in April 1951.

Burroughs (Old Bull Lee), Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx) and Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac himself as the narrator Sal Paradise.

The novel is a roman à clef, with many key figures in the Beat movement, such as William S. Generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of A novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States, it is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture

On the road jack k