Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award
A penniless writer named Sal Paradise becomes inspired to hitchhike across America, taking the listener on a freewheeling journey through the 1950s youth counterculture. Joining up with other fellow vagabonds who are in love with life and open to adventure, they explore jazz, sex, drugs, and mysticism on the fringes of society.
Credited as the book that launched Jack Kerouac's career, On the Road epitomized to the world the generation that Kerouac himself named as "beat." It created a sensation by chronicling a spontaneous and wandering way of life in a style that seemed founded both on jazz and on drug-induced visions.
Reflecting the jazzy style of its day…Kerouac counterpoints the rhythms and structures of Sal Paradise's long, poetic sentences with Dean Moriarty's bursts of raw energy to create the music of this apotheosis of Beat. Tom Parker performs with intelligence in pacing and characterization and complete awareness of meanings….Parker's performance is tremendous. He makes it seem so easy!
JACK KEROUAC (1922-1969) was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. He attended local Catholic schools and eventually Columbia University, becoming in the 1940s and 1950s a member of what was to be called "the Beat generation." His first novel appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road (1957) that epitomized to the world the Beat philosophy.
