On The Road.

KEROUAC, Jack.

Item Number: 136877

New York: The Viking Press, 1957.

First edition of Kerouac’s classic novel, signed by five important members of the Beat Generation. Octavo, original black cloth. Association copy, boldly signed by Allen Ginsberg on the verso of the front free endpaper, “Allen Ginsberg 10/6/94 AH”, signed with a drawing by Gregory Corso of Kerouac on the half-title page, “Corso of Kerouac”, signed by William S. Burroughs on the half-title page, “William S. Burroughs 12/17/87”, signed by Herbert Huncke on the half-title page, “Herbert E. Huncke 12-17-89”, and signed by Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the copyright page. The origin of the Beat Generation can be traced back to Columbia University and the meeting of Jack Kerouac, Herbert Huncke, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Lucien Carr in the early 1940s. Huncke, a street hustler who Kerouac later immortalized as the character Elmo Hassel in On The Road, originally used the phrase “beat” to describe the emerging underground, anti-conformist youth movement and Kerouac appropriated it and altered the meaning to include the connotations “upbeat”, “beatific”, and a member of the “Beat Generation.” Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959), and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) were crucial in establishing the movement’s style, themes, and values, including the rejection of economic materialism, importance of making an individual spiritual quest, exploration of American and Eastern religions, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration. In 1954, Ginsberg and the youngest member of the Beat Generation, Gregory Corso, moved to San Francisco where Ginsberg organized the now historic Six Gallery reading on October 7, 1955: his first public reading where he performed the just finished first part of Howl. The audience included Neal Cassady, who passed around a wine jug and a collection plate and an inebriated Jack Kerouac, who refused to read his own work but cheered the other poets on, and later wrote an account of the evening in his novel The Dharma Bums. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of the new City Lights Bookstore, also attended the reading and telegrammed Ginsberg the following day with an offer to publish Howl, saying, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?” Additionally laid in is a postcard featuring an photograph of Kerouac in Tangier in 1957 taken by Ginsberg and a number of reviews of the book including an August 19, 2007 New York Times Book Review feature. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Bill English. Ownership name. A unique example.

The raucous, exuberant, often wildly funny account of a journey through America and Mexico, Jack Kerouac's On the Road instantly defined a generation on its publication in 1957: it was, in the words of a New York Times reviewer, "the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat.'" Written in the mode of ecstatic improvisation that Allen Ginsberg described as "spontaneous bop prosody," Kerouac's novel remains electrifying in its thirst for experience and its defiant rebuke of American conformity. In his portrayal of the fervent relationship between the writer Sal Paradise and his outrageous, exasperating, and inimitable friend Dean Moriarty, Kerouac created one of the great friendships in American literature; and his rendering of the cities and highways and wildernesses that his characters restlessly explore are a hallucinatory travelogue of a nation he both mourns and celebrates. "On the Road has become a classic of the Beat Movement with its stream-of-consciousness depiction of the rejection of mainstream American values set in a physical and metaphysical journey across America" (Book in America, 136). It is the basis for the 2012 film featuring Garrett Hedlund, Sam Riley, Kristen Stewart, Alice Braga, Amy Adams, Tom Sturridge, Danny Morgan, Elisabeth Moss, Kirsten Dunst, and Viggo Mortensen. The executive producers were Francis Ford Coppola, Patrick Batteux, Jerry Leider, and Tessa Ross. Named by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century and on TIME Magazine's list of the 100 best English language novels from 1923-2005.