It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use.

The novel is a roman à clef, with many key figures of the Beat movement represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac, himself, as the narrator, Sal Paradise.

The New York Times hailed the book's appearance as "the most beautifully executed, the clearest, and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac, himself, named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is.

Remi arranges for Sal to take a job as a night watchman at a boarding camp for merchant sailors waiting for their ship.

In December 1948, Sal is celebrating Christmas with his relatives in Testament, Virginia, when Dean shows up with Marylou (having left his second wife, Camille, and their newborn baby, Amy, in San Francisco) and Ed Dunkel.

The stay ends on a sour note: "what I accomplished by coming to Frisco I don't know," and Sal departs, taking the bus back to New York.

Dean drives most of the way, crazy, careless, often speeding at over one hundred miles per hour (160 km/h), delivering the car in a disheveled state.

In Gregoria, they meet Victor, a local kid, who leads them to a bordello where they have their last grand party, dancing to mambo, drinking, and having fun with prostitutes.

Sal later reflects as he sits on a river pier under a New Jersey night sky about the roads and lands of America that he has travelled and states: "...

[5]After Kerouac dropped out of Columbia University, he served as a Merchant Marine on several different sailing vessels, before returning to New York to write.

"[9] The first draft of what was to become the published novel was written in three weeks in April 1951, while Kerouac lived with Joan Haverty, his second wife, at 454 West 20th Street in New York City's Manhattan.

In the following years, Kerouac continued to revise this manuscript, deleting some sections (including some sexual depictions deemed pornographic in the 1950s) and adding smaller literary passages.

[11] Kerouac wrote a number of inserts intended for On the Road between 1951 and 1952, before eventually omitting them from the manuscript and using them to form the basis of another work, Visions of Cody (1951–1952).

As well as containing material that was excised from the original draft, due to its explicit nature, the scroll version also uses the real names of the protagonists, so Dean Moriarty becomes Neal Cassady and Carlo Marx becomes Allen Ginsberg, etc.

[14] In 2007, Gabriel Anctil, a journalist of Montreal daily Le Devoir, discovered in Kerouac's personal archives in New York almost 200 pages of his writings entirely in Quebec French, with colloquialisms.

Since its publication, critical attention has focused on issues of both the context and the style, addressing the actions of the characters as well as the nature of Kerouac's prose.

In his review for The New York Times, Gilbert Millstein wrote, "...its publication is a historic occasion in so far as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion" and praised it as "a major novel.

While Kerouac sees his characters as "mad to live ... desirous of everything at the same time," the reviewer likens them to cases of "psychosis that is a variety of Ganser Syndrome" who "aren't really mad—they only seem to be.

"Kerouac was this deep, lonely, melancholy man," Hilary Holladay of the University of Massachusetts Lowell told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

On the Road has been considered by Tim Hunt to be a transitional phase between the traditional narrative structure of The Town and the City (1951) and the "wild form" of his later books like Visions of Cody (1972).

[26] Kerouac's own explanation of his style in "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" (1953) is that his writing is like the Impressionist painters who sought to create art through direct observation.

Matt Theado feels he endeavored to present a raw version of truth which did not lend itself to the traditional process of revision and rewriting but rather the emotionally charged practice of the spontaneity he pursued.

[27] Theado argues that the personal nature of the text helps foster a direct link between Kerouac and the reader; that his casual diction and very relaxed syntax was an intentional attempt to depict events as they happened and to convey all of the energy and emotion of the experiences.

And as I sat there listening to that sound of the night which bop has come to represent for all of us, I thought of all my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing-about."

Main characters Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty are clearly enthusiastic fans of the jazz/bebop and early rhythm-and-blues musicians and records that were in the musical mix during the years when story took place, 1947 to 1950.

For example, in one of two separate passages where they go to clubs to hear British jazz pianist George Shearing, the effect of the music is described as almost overwhelming for Dean (Pt.

For example, while driving across the upper Midwest toward New York City, Sal mentions that he and Dean are listening to the radio show of well-known jazz deejay Symphony Sid Torin (Pt.

[31] Brando never responded to the letter; later Warner Bros. offered $110,000 for the rights to Kerouac's book, but his agent, Sterling Lord, declined it, hoping for a $150,000 deal from Paramount Pictures, which did not occur.

[32] Coppola tried out several screenwriters, including Michael Herr, Barry Gifford, and novelist Russell Banks, even writing a draft himself with his son Roman, before settling on José Rivera.

[33][34] Several different plans were considered: Joel Schumacher as director, with Billy Crudup as Sal Paradise, and Colin Farrell as Dean Moriarty; then Ethan Hawke as Paradise and Brad Pitt as Moriarty; in 1995, he planned to shoot on black-and-white 16mm film and held auditions with poet Allen Ginsberg in attendance, but all those projects fell through.