On The Road [1957] - Jack Kerouac

". . . I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww!"

Quiet, introspective writer Sal Paradise (Kerouac) meets wild-eyed, maniacal Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), "a young jailkid all hung-up on the wonderful possibilities of becoming a real intellectual." The two embark on an odyssey of discovery - fueled by drugs, booze and whores - across post-World War II America.

On the Road is a seminal novel—the best work to come out of the Beat Generation (next to Naked Lunch, of course!). Kerouac disciples include Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead, Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Tom Waits, The Grateful Dead, 10,000 Maniacs, King Crimson, David Bowie, Johnny Depp, Ken Kesey, LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka), Hunter S. Thompson, Janis Joplin, David Carradine, Jack Nicholson, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Kim Novak and Nick Nolte. Thinly veiled characters in On the Road include Old Bull Lee (William S. Burroughs) and Carlo Marx (Allen Ginsberg). In creating his masterpiece, Kerouac relied on the inspiration of Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel), Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass), Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn), Jack London (Call of the Wild) and Herman Melville (Moby Dick) as major literary influences. Kerouac himself summed up the Beat Generation very well: "I want to make this very clear. I mean, here I am, a guy who was a railroad brakeman, and a cowboy, and a football player-just a lot of things ordinary guys do. And I wasn't trying to create any kind of consciousness or anything like that. We didn't have a whole lot of heavy abstract thoughts. We were just a bunch of guys who were out trying to get laid."

On the Road Trivia

• On the Road was written in just three weeks on a 120-foot-long "scroll" taped together without margins or page breaks.