Jack Kerouac · 1957 · road
Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel, written from his own journeys of 1947 to 1950. Sal Paradise crosses and recrosses America four times chasing Dean Moriarty - by Hudson, by Cadillac, by Greyhound and hardly ever on foot - through Denver, San Francisco, a Southern Christmas and finally down into Mexico, where the friendship runs out.
- 1New York
Sal Paradise is living at his aunt's in New Jersey, finishing a book on the GI Bill, when he decides to go west after Dean Moriarty - and discovers on the first attempt that hitchhiking in the rain is not what the maps promised.
- 2Denver
The first trip, summer 1947: Dean, Carlo Marx and a city full of people talking all night - and Sal arriving to find his friends have arranged their lives into a shape he cannot get inside.
- 3San Francisco
North Beach, jazz until four in the morning, and stretches of being broke in a strange city - the first crossing ending in odd jobs and a girl in the San Joaquin Valley he cannot stay with.
- 4Los Angeles
Down the coast with Terry, picking cotton outside Bakersfield and sleeping in a tent - the part of the book that is least like a party and most like the country it is actually crossing.
- 5Testament
Christmas 1948 with his brother's family in the Southern town Kerouac renamed - a '49 Hudson pulls up carrying Dean, Marylou and Ed Dunkel, and the second trip begins on somebody else's holiday.
- 6New Orleans
Hauling furniture north to New Jersey and back twice, and then straight down to Old Bull Lee's in Algiers - the second trip proper, in January 1949, running the length of the South in a car that will not last.
- 7New York
Back east between journeys: Sal finishing books, Dean going through wives and jobs, and the two of them meeting up again each time with slightly less left over than before.
- 8Mexico City
The last road south in a battered Ford - and Sal goes down with dysentery in a hotel room, and Dean leaves him there and drives home, which is the moment the book stops pretending.