On The Road
by Jack Kerouac · first published 1957
35% recommend58% neutral8% critical
Why HN recommends it
Restless road-trip novel in bebop-like prose, valued for its appetite for travel and living in the present; readers reread it and often first meet it in youth, to feel alive and see the world.
Common criticism: Some find it a pointless story about unlikable people
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Described as everything from a "last gasp" of romantic fiction to a founding text of the Beat Generation movement, this story amounts to a nonfiction novel (as critics were later to describe some works). Unpublished writer buddies wander from coast to coast in search of whatever they find, eager for experience. Kerouac's spokesman is Sal Paradise (himself) and real-life friend Neal Casady appears as Dean Moriarty.
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…personal favorite (along with his short stories, which I highly recommend), but if it's your first time reading Hemingway, might be better to go with The Sun Also Rises. Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates) On the Road (Jack Kerouac) *One of my personal favorites, but most people either love or hate it, so maybe save this towards the end. On my own reading list: Speedboat (Renata Adler) Money (Martin Amis) Love…
on “Ask HN: I have no commitments for the next 6 months – what books should I read?” ↗…George Orwell To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie My Antonia by Willa Cather (1918) On the Road by Jack Kerouac The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson Mccullers The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934) Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf Ulysses…
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in 2013” ↗…got to see the total solar eclipse. And you might read how amazing it was in a book on a train one day. PS: I apologize for the somewhat-deliberately provoking tone. On a softer note, have you read "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac? If so, do you honestly say that you want none of that? If not, you're in luck, because reading it is a marvelous experience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Road This book is culturally…
on “Lyft says nearly 250K of its passengers ditched a personal car in 2017” ↗…Denial of Death by Ernest Becker The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem The Society of the Spectacle by Debord Nihilist Communism by Monsieur Dupont The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin On the Road by Jack Kerouac To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee And other classics: 1984, brave new world, planet of the apes, huckleberry fin, slaughter house five (anything by vonnegut actually!). Anything I…
on “Books That Changed My Life” ↗The Alchemist. On the Road. Stranger In a Strange Land. From the Earth to the Moon How to Win Friends and Influence People Life of Pi Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. The Little Prince Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?…
on “Ask HN: Inspirational Books” ↗On The Road - Jack Kerouac. How to live in the present moment and have a voracious appetite for travel and new experiences.
on “Ask HN: What books fundamentally changed the way you think about the world?” ↗On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I read it at 18 and I wish I had read it way earlier. It taught me to be mad, to live life, to get out and see the world. But looking back at it, it also taught me how to be responsible…
on “Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?” ↗The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. On the Road by Kerouac. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I read Pessoa to feel not so alone. I read Kerouac to feel alive. I read Meditations to not lose my head.
on “Ask HN: Which book have you re-read the most times? how many times?” ↗The Outsider - Albert Camus Galapagos - Kurt Vonnegut On the Road - Jack Kerouac Animal Farm - George Orwell
on “Ask HN: What book/s have you read more than once?” ↗There's a great book about it called On The Road. I can also recommend Ginsberg's Howl, which Kerouac gave its title: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-P2fILsLH8 > I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness > Starving hysterical naked
on “Kerouac and Buddhism” ↗Thanks, I'll look them up. I have read Jack Kerouac, On the Road, great book. [Flashback 20:57 Sep 25, Jack Kerouac, (this means I just remembered the memory for the first time since the lobotomy 13 years ago, specific distinct sensation that happens the very first…
on “Study finds high levels of PFAS in school uniforms” ↗…Don Quijote, Cien años de soledad, Fernando Pessoa, Ferreira de Castro, Raduan Nassar or getting down to english solely, Ulysses play on words or even biographies like Walden by Henry David Thoreau or On The Road by Jack Kerouac or poems by Walt Whitman, Maya Angelou and even translated stuff like Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Hans Staden etc. ※ i'm curious the motif of your dismissal. specially when people dedicate…
on “Don't make fun of renowned author Dan Brown (2013)” ↗On the Road by Jack Kerouac
on “Ask HN: What book has had the greatest impact on your life?” ↗…kept a close count, is a lot. I don't know that it's something I'd recommend to everyone, but the book has its own sort of whimsy that is distinct from the movie, though both are enjoyable. Kerouac's "On the Road" is another that I read often. Somewhere in the once-a-year phase. "Slaughterhouse Five" is another I read with some regularity, and I find it different every time I read it, as I have a new set of personal…
on “Why reading a book 100 times is a great idea” ↗…Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter - Principles, Ray Dalio - L'Etranger, Albert Camus - Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire - The Dao of Capital, Mark Spitznagel - Howl, Allen Ginsberg - On the Road, Jack Kerouac I could go on and on...
on “Ask HN: Which books have made you introspect?” ↗