On the road
Kerouac’s On the road: first edition, first printing of the defining work of the Beat generation.
A beautiful copy preserved in the publisher’s cloth, with its dust jacket, as issued.
In-8 de (3) ff., 310 pp., (2) ff. Toile noire, jaquette de l’éditeur, partiellement non coupé. Cartonnage de l’éditeur.
204 x 135 mm.
Kerouac, Jack. On the road.
New York, The Viking Press, 1957.
First edition first printing of the defining work of the Beat Generation which influenced many American writers and« marqua toute une génération ».
It follows the travels of Sal Paradise, a stand in for Kerouac himself, and is based on a series of journeys Kerouac took from 1947 to 1950. The work was typed up on a continuous "scroll" of sheets that Kerouac had taped together. "On The Road" appears on both Modern Library's list of the 100 best novels of the century and on Time Magazine list of the 100 best English language novels from 1923-2005. "[I]ts publication is a historic occasion. the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is." (Contemporary New York Times review)
“When “On the Road” came out, in September, 1957, it was praised in the New York Times as the novel of the Beat Generation, equivalent in stature and significance to “The Sun Also Rises,” the novel of the Lost Generation. The book was a best-seller, and it made Jack Kerouac, who had worked on it for ten years, a celebrity. It is sometimes said of Kerouac that fame killed him—that he was driven crazy by being continually addressed as the spokesman for a generation and by endless unwelcome requests to explain the meaning of the term “Beat.” Kerouac was certainly undone by something. After the success of “On the Road,” he continued to write at a manic pace, as he always had, but he became a suicidal alcoholic, and he died, of a hemorrhage caused by acute liver damage, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven. (He had by then written more than twenty-five books.) The notion of the Beat Generation was hardly thrust upon him, though” (Louis Menand).
« Sa chronique personnelle de l’Amérique des années 40 et 50 se double d’une formidable évocation de l’espace américain, qui rattache Kerouac à la tradition des poètes bardes, comme Walt Whitman : l’auteur de Sur la route voulait inventer une forme romanesque aux dimensions du continent, une écriture aussi souple et nerveuse qu’un solo de jazz, aussi ample et fluide que le Mississippi. C’est là l’originalité et la réussite incomparables de Jack Kerouac » (Dictionnaire des auteurs).
Provenance : ex-libris Christian Heuer.
A beautiful copy preserved in the publisher’s cloth with its dust jacket, as issued.
