On the Road

On the Road is a novel by the American writer Jack Kerouac, published in 1957. It is based on his own journeys across the United States, and it is the book most often named as the defining work of the Beat Generation.

Kerouac appears in it as the narrator, Sal Paradise, and his friend Neal Cassady appears as Dean Moriarty. The two of them, and the people around them, are living for the moment against a background of jazz, poetry and refusal, and what they are looking for is never quite defined.

The novel is a roman a clef, which means that the characters are versions of real people. The idea took shape through a series of notebooks in the late 1940s and was typed out on a continuous roll of paper in three weeks in 1951.

It was published by Viking Press in 1957, and the Modern Library put it at number 55 on its list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century. It was also chosen by Time magazine for its list of the hundred best English-language novels.