"BECAUSE THE ONLY PEOPLE FOR ME ARE THE MAD ONES": LOVELY FIRST EDITION OF ON THE ROAD

KEROUAC, Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1957. Octavo, original black cloth, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom clamshell box. $7200.

First edition of Kerouac's second and most important novel, "a physical and metaphysical journey across America," in colorful original dust jacket.

"Between 1947 and 1950, Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac took off on a freewheeling journey through the USA and Mexico in search of something outside their domestic experience. Ten years later their adventures were related in On the Road… The novel's composition has become a well-known anecdote in its own right. Returning home from his wanderings, Kerouac spent almost a year pondering how (specifically, in what form) he might convey the life he had been living. Several false starts were made, but in April 1951 he fed a 120-foot roll of teletype into his typewriter, typed for three weeks and the result, largely unrevised, was On the Road" (Parker, 339). "Just before Jack Kerouac died in 1969, he told Neal Cassady that he feared he would die like Melville, unknown and unappreciated in his own time… 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). Bruccoli & Clark I:217.

Book fine. Dust jacket with minor edgewear and a few shorts tears and creasing; spine toned just a bit, with a bit of loss to spine ends. An extremely good copy.