From one of today's top Kerouac scholars comes a riveting, behind-the-scenes look at the true adventures that spawned one of the greatest American novels of all time, as well as the real lives of the key characters of the novel—Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty, Carlo Marx, Old Bull Hubbard, Camille, and others. Acclaimed author Paul Maher takes readers on the road with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady via unprecedented access to Kerouac and Cassady's correspondence, Ginsberg and Kerouac's notebooks and journals, as well as a look at the formative experience of Kerouac's philosophical and authorial aesthetic that went into this 20th-century classic. Exactly fifty years after the September 1957 publication of On the Road comes the most thorough, insightful, and surprising account of the book's genesis.
