On The Road by Jack Kerouac

This Beat classic has been sitting on my bookshelf for a few years now and so when I heard about the upcoming Hollywood film of this book I decided it was high time I got familiar with it before I see too many trailers and lose the ability to create my own visualisations.

Jack Kerouac wrote this book against the backdrop of the cold war and at a time when ordinary Americans were becoming wrought with fear under the watchful eye of government officials on the search for communist-sympathisers and Soviet Spies. While all of this tension was going on the young people of America were in search of freedom, unrestrained by the pressures of regular life, they were pondering the question 'how are we to live?' and they spent their youths looking everywhere along the road for the answer.

On The Road is an autobiographical novel and tells of Jack Kerouc and Neil Cassadys adventures travelling, loving, dancing, suffering, discovering everything before their eyes and experimenting with getting high. The characters would all later be renamed before publication upon the instruction of the publishers so Jack Kerouac would become Sal Paradise and Neil Cassady became the brave, wild, tender, loving, unfaithful, human sponge and eternally free Dean Moriarty.

Here's what the blurb says...

Sal Paradise (Sam Riley), a young innocent, joins his hero Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund), a traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat, on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz becomes an exploration of personal freedom, a test of the limits of the American dream. A brilliant blend of fiction and autobiography, Jack Kerouac's exhilarating novel swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion. One of the most influential and important novels of the 20th century, On the Road is the book that launched the Beat Generation and remains the bible of that literary movement.

Read this book before you see the film, I can't imagine that any two hour film could capture all of the ups and downs and rich descriptive passages that are between the pages. I'm a fan of Garrett Hedlund though and can't wait to see him on the big screen as the eratic Dean Moriarty flitting from one thought to the next, entranced by beautiful exotic women and becoming enthralled in down & dirty jazz riffs. 

Defintiely a book to devour if you're thinking of taking a road trip across the great United States of America!

Love

Lorraine

Lacroix x