On the Road
Price: $4,200.00
Hard Cover. New York: The Viking Press, 1957. First Edition. Very Good / Dust Jacket Included.
First edition, first printing. Publisher's black cloth, with front board and spine lettered in white; in its original black dust jacket, designed by Bill English, lettered in white. Very good book, with light spotting to cloth, a very gentle lean to spine, light bump to top right corner of front board, and a spot of staining to top edge of text block; good or better unclipped dust jacket, with shallow chipping to spine ends, light rubbing, scratching, and spotting to panels and spine, a touch of staining to spine, some edgewear to panels including a few closed tears, splitting along bottom 2-inches of front flap fold, and lightly nicked corners. Overall, a solid copy of Kerouac's magnum opus, very clean internally. On the Road is Kerouac's second novel and certainly his most renowned. Before its release in 1957, sections of On the Road were published as articles in a variety of literary magazines and were received well by audiences, prompting the publishers to describe the first complete edition as "a publishing event of no small interest." Today, On the Road is best known as the novel that made Jack Kerouac famous, and it remains popular with younger generations. In this work, Kerouac describes his years traveling the United States and Mexico with his friend Neal Cassady in their youthful search for adventure, excitement, and knowledge of self in stream-of-consciousness prose that is as captivating as the story itself. Kerouac wrote the bulk of this novel in three weeks on a singular 120-foot-long scroll and spent years editing and revising it before its publication in 1957. Item #JK059
