On the Road

Twentieth-Century Classics, a new hardback series from Penguin Classics: the era’s greatest books with cover artwork from its most celebrated photographers, bound in signature eau-de-nil cloth.

On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, Kerouac’s American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, and the narrative goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and passion.

Cover photograph by Robert Frank