This novel follows Sal Paradise, a young writer in postwar America, who sets out on a series of road trips across the continent. His guide and companion is Dean Moriarty, a charming, reckless drifter whose energy both thrills and troubles him. Together and apart they travel between New York, Denver, San Francisco and Mexico, meeting musicians, drifters, lovers and workers along the way. Based closely on Kerouac's own journeys, the book is told in a rushing, jazz-like style. It became a defining text of the Beat Generation and remains a classic portrait of freedom, friendship and longing.
Quotes
Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.
Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.
He was a real red-nose young drunk of thirty and would have bored me ordinarily, except that my senses were sharp for any kind of human friendship.
And as I sat there listening to that sound of the night which bop has come to represent for all of us, I thought of my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing-about.