On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition - Jack Kerouac Audiobook

Written by Jack Kerouac
Read by Will Patton
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
Release date: 10-18-07
Publisher: Penguin Audio

A fictionalized account of his own journeys across America with his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s beatnik odyssey captured the soul of a generation and changed the landscape of American fiction forever.

Influenced by Jack London and Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac always wanted to be a writer, but his true voice only emerged when he wrote about his own experiences in On the Road.

Leaving a broken marriage behind him, Sal Paradise (Kerouac) joins Dean Moriarty (Cassady), a former reform school boy, on a series of journeys that takes them from New York to San Francisco, then south to Mexico. Hitching rides and boarding buses, they enter a world of hobos and drifters, fruit-pickers and migrant families, small towns and wide horizons. Adrift from conventional society, they experience America in the raw: a place where living is hard, but ‘life is holy and every moment is precious’.

With its smoky, jazz-filled atmosphere and its restless, yearning spirit of adventure, On the Road left its mark on the culture of the late 20th century, influencing countless books, films and songs. Kerouac’s prose is remarkable both for its colloquial swing and for the pure lyricism inspired by the American landscape – ‘the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy’.

Attention – Reader with “modern sensibilities”, there is absolutely nothing “politically correct” about this classic and is better for it. In the ’50 we were more free-wielding and came out stronger for it. After all, some of us lived through two wars.