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The 100 best novels: No 76 – On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

Written By Unknown on Monday, March 2, 2015 | 12:58 AM

The creative history of Kerouac’s beat-generation classic, fuelled by pea soup and benzedrine, has become as famous as the novel itself

In 1855, a young American poet named Walt Whitman announced, with typical gusto, that “the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem”, and made good on this claim in a landmark collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, transforming America’s literary imagination for ever. When, exactly 100 years later, Jack Kerouac began to hammer out the typescript of his own masterpiece, he was consciously responding to Whitman’s challenge “to express the inexpressible”. This would become Kerouac’s lifelong ambition and it expressed itself as On the Road . The book would be an ur-text for the James Dean decade.