Sal Paradise crisscrosses postwar America with the manic, magnetic Dean Moriarty, chasing jazz, women, and a restless idea of freedom from New York to Denver to San Francisco to Mexico City.
Books mentioned in On the Road (3)
Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier: “I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall, "Le Grand Meaulnes" by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along.”
The Mysteries of Paris by Eugène Sue: “Out of his seabag he fished a copy of Eugene Sue's Mysteries of Paris and, adjusting the front of his T-shirt, began reading on the street corner with a pedantic air.”
Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway: “Have you ever read Green Hills of Africa?”
Books that mention On the Road (6)
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl: “Driving with Dad wasn’t cathartic, mind-freeing driving (see On the Road, Kerouac, 1957).”
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green: “As Kerouac does in On the Road when he writes, "Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields."”
How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom: “The Magic Mountain cannot be read sandwiched in between On the Road and some chunk of cyberpunk.”
Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry: “the novel by John Clellon Holmes that preceded On the Road in the chronology of Beatdom”
Literary Life: A Second Memoir by Larry McMurtry: “Jack Kerouac I never met, and I regret that, because I think his one really good novel, On the Road, marked the real end of New Critical dominance.”