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First published in the United States of America by the Viking Press, Inc., 1957

First published in Great Britain by André Deutsch 1958

Viking Compass Edition published 1959

Published in Penguin Books in Great Britain 1972

Published in Penguin Books in the United States of America 1976

Reprinted with an introduction and bibliography 1991

Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2000

Copyright © Jack Kerouac, 1955, 1957

Introduction and bibliography copyright © Ann Charters, 1991

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author of the introduction and bibliography has been asserted

Parts of Chapters 12 and 13, Book One, appeared in The Paris Review under the title ‘The Mexican Girl’; parts of Chapters 10 and 14, Book Three, in New World Writing (Seven), entitled ‘Jazz of the Beat Generation’, and an excerpt from Chapter 5, Book Four, in New Dimensions 16, entitled ‘A Billowy Trip in the World.’

ISBN: 978-0-141-91256-1

Contents

Introduction by Ann Charters

On the Road

Suggestions for Further Reading

Follow Penguin

THE BEGINNING

Suggestions for Further Reading

Bibliographies

Charters, Ann. A Bibliography of Works by Jack Kerouac, 1939–1975. New York: Phoenix Book Shop, 1975.

Milewski, Robert J. Jack Kerouac: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Sources, 1944–1979. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981.

Biographies

Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Biography. San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1973.

Clark, Tom. Jack Kerouac. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.

Gifford, Barry, and Lee Lawrence. Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: St Martin’s, 1978.

Jarvis, Charles E. Visions of Kerouac. Lowell, Mass.: Ithaca Press, 1974.

McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979.

Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: Grove, 1983.

References

Beaulieu, Victor-Lévy. Jack Kerouac: A Chicken-Essay. Translated by Sheila Fischman. Toronto: The Coach House Press, 1975.

Berrigan, Ted. ‘The Art of Fiction XLI,’ interview with Kerouac. Paris Review, 43 (Summer 1968).

Challis, Chris. Quest for Kerouac. London: Faber and Faber, 1984.

Charters, Ann, ed. The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, Parts I and II. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 16. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1983.

Charters, Ann. ‘Kerouac’s Literary Method and Experiments: The Evidence of the Manuscript Notebooks in the Berg Collection.’ Bulletin of Research in the Humanities (Winter 1981), Vol. 84, No. 4, pp. 431–450.

Charters, Ann, ed. The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Viking, 1992.

Cook, Bruce. The Beat Generation. New York: Scribners, 1971.

Donaldson, Scott, ed. On the Road: Text and Criticism. New York: Viking, 1979.

Feied, Frederick. No Pie in the Sky: The Hobo as American Cultural Hero in the Works of Jack London, John Dos Passos, and Jack Kerouac. New York: Citadel, 1964.

French, Warren. Jack Kerouac: Novelist of the Beat Generation. Boston: Twayne, 1986.

Gifford, Barry. Kerouac’s Town. Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts, 1977.

Gussow, Adam. ‘Bohemia Revisited: Malcolm Cowley, Jack Kerouac, and On the Road.’ The Georgia Review (Summer 1984), Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2.

Hipkiss, Robert A. Jack Kerouac: Prophet of the New Romanticism. Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1976.

Holmes, John Clellon. Gone in October: Last Reflections on Jack Kerouac. Hailey, Idaho: Limberlost Press, 1985.

Holmes, John Clellon. Nothing More to Declare. New York: Dutton, 1967.

Holmes, John Clellon, Representative Men. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988.

Hunt, Tim. Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1981.

Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983.

Knight, Arthur, and Kit Knight. Kerouac and the Beats. New York: Paragon House, 1988.

Miles, Barry. Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

Montgomery, John. The Kerouac We Knew. Kentfield, Cal.: Fels & Firn Press, 1982.

Parker, Brad. Kerouac: An Introduction. Lowell, Mass: Corporation for the Humanities, 1989.

Parkinson, Thomas, ed. A Casebook on the Beat. New York: Crowell, 1961.

Poteet, Maurice. Textes De L’Exode. Montreal, Québec: Guerin litterature, 1987.

Stephenson, Gregory. The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.

Tytell, John. Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.

Walsh, Joy, ed. Jack Kerouac: Statement in Brown. Clarence Center, NY: Textile Bridge, 1984.

Weinreich, Regina. The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.

PENGUIN BOOKS

ON THE ROAD

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, where, he said, he ‘roamed fields and riverbanks by day and night, wrote little novels in my room, first novel written at age eleven, also kept extensive diaries and “newspapers” covering my own-invented horse-racing and baseball and football worlds (as recorded in novel Doctor Sax).’ He was educated by Jesuit brothers in Lowell. He said that he ‘decided to become a writer at age seventeen under influence of Sebastian Sampas, local young poet, who later died on Anzio beach head; read the life of Jack London at eighteen and decided to also be a lonesome traveler; early literary influences Saroyan and Hemingway; later Wolfe (after I had broken leg in Freshman football at Columbia read Tom Wolfe and roamed his New York on crutches).’

Kerouac wished, however, to develop his own new prose style, which he called ‘spontaneous prose.’ In it he recorded the life of the American ‘traveler,’ and the experience of the Beat generation of the 1950s. This may clearly be seen in his most famous novel On the Road, and also in The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums. Other works include Big Sur, Desolation Angels, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Gerard, Tristessa, and a book of poetry called Mexico City Blues. His first more orthodox published novel was The Town and the City. Jack Kerouac, who described himself as a ‘strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic,’ was working on his longest novel, a surrealistic study of the last ten years of his life, when he died in 1969, aged forty-seven.

Ann Charters, Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, has been interested in Beat writers since 1956, when as an undergraduate English major she attended the repeat perfomance of the Six Gallery poetry reading in Berkeley where Allen Ginsberg gave his second public reading of Howl. She began collecting books written by Beat writers when she was a graduate student at Columbia University, and after completing her doctorate she worked with Jack Kerouac to compile his bibliography. After his death she wrote the first Kerouac biography and edited his posthumous collection, Scattered Poems. She has written a literary study of Charles Olson and biographies of black entertainer Bert Williams and (with her husband) the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. She was the general editor of the two-volume encyclopedia The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America and has published a collection of her photographic portraits of well-known writers in the book Beats & Company.