all detailed' (per The TLS), Cassady wrote with shocking honesty and immediacy of the ecstatic highs and the abject 'horrors' he was experiencing - and subsequently awoke in Kerouac new possibilities for American narrative prose. In 16,000 words and using a singular style that Kerouac later described as 'all first person, fast, mad, confessional. However, the novel is a dry, domestic fiction, written in imitation of earlier American novelists such as Thomas Wolfe. But while his writing was about to undergo a significant transformation, his apprenticeship in conventional prose gave him the groundwork to achieve what was to follow.Īccording to Alta Journal, the 'Joan Anderson letter,' as Kerouac and Cassady came to refer to it, was written in 1950, a few years into the pair's friendship, and tells the tale of Cassady's meeting of the titular woman and his subsequent leaving of her after an eventful stay in a 'flophouse' in Denver. The book is a doorstopper clocking in at nearly 500 pages long, and, like his more famous work, based on his own life. To account for such techniques - which permeate the otherwise disorganized and unstudied style of 'On the Road' - readers can look back to Kerouac's first published novel, 'The Town and the City,' which was released in 1950 when Kerouac was 28 years old (per Britannica). But the passage is not as wild and freewheeling as it might first appear, with Jack Kerouac employing classical literary devices - anaphora, parallelism - to create the sense of tension building before a sudden release. So reads one of the most famous passages from ' On the Road,' one of the novel's many ecstatic, performative climaxes.

On the road jack kerouac deutsch