On The Road.
KEROUAC, Jack.
On The Road.
“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road": First Edition of Jack Kerouac's On The Road
New York: Viking Press, 1957.
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Item Number: 4006
First edition. Octavo, original black cloth. Very good in the original dust jacket which has had some light profesional restoration. What makes this copy interesting, is that it is from Columbia University Library Lending Service. It was taken out between Sept. 11, 1957 and ending Dec. 3, 1957. The slip on the verso is the only library mark. Kerouac came to Columbia on a football scholarship and in reality had been recruited by more football friendly Boston College, and chose Columbia for its New York literary connections instead. He turned fully to writing after a broken leg in 1940, his first year”(New York Times). He enjoyed Professors Mark Van Doren and Raymond Weaver, and got an A in Van Doren’s Shakespeare class. A nice association.
The raucous, exuberant, often wildly funny account of a journey through America and Mexico, Jack Kerouac's On the Road instantly defined a generation on its publication in 1957: it was, in the words of a New York Times reviewer, "the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat.'" Written in the mode of ecstatic improvisation that Allen Ginsberg described as "spontaneous bop prosody," Kerouac's novel remains electrifying in its thirst for experience and its defiant rebuke of American conformity. In his portrayal of the fervent relationship between the writer Sal Paradise and his outrageous, exasperating, and inimitable friend Dean Moriarty, Kerouac created one of the great friendships in American literature; and his rendering of the cities and highways and wildernesses that his characters restlessly explore are a hallucinatory travelogue of a nation he both mourns and celebrates. "On the Road has become a classic of the Beat Movement with its stream-of-consciousness depiction of the rejection of mainstream American values set in a physical and metaphysical journey across America" (Book in America, 136).
