On the Road

Sal Paradise crosses and re-crosses America with Dean Moriarty, a friend whose appetite for motion is inseparable from his capacity to wreck the people around him. Kerouac drew on his own travels and wrote in long propulsive sentences built to imitate the rhythm of jazz and the road itself. Read as a manifesto for freedom it can disappoint, because the exhilaration keeps curdling into exhaustion and abandonment. Read as a record of what that pursuit costs, it remains the defining document of the Beat Generation.