Not only was there no traffic but the rain came down in buckets and I had no shelter. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him. I stepped right up and gestured in the rain; they consulted; I looked like a maniac, of course, with my hair all wet, my shoes sopping. At one point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty. Hated it and was often bored by it at the same time as being seriously impressed and occasionally wowed. “Brilliant and unique…in terms of sheer storytelling mastery, it's one of the best books we've seen in awhile. As a mid-30's, the writing was awful. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. He swore he could get me into the engine room. Two keen minds that they are, they took to each other at the drop of a hat. Not a truck. Please try your request again later. The classic novel of freedom and the search for authenticity that defined a generation—made into a 2012 film by Walter Salles, director of The Motorcycle Diaries. I walked, after a few cold beers, to the edge of town, and it was a long walk. However, having said that there are moments of pure brilliant poetic writing. Along about three in the afternoon, after an apple pie and ice cream in a roadside stand, a woman stopped for me in a little coupe. I was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew. Suddenly, I realized I wasn't the only one to think I was a nut because I had strange thoughts. So I went to the Y to get a room; they didn’t have any, and by instinct I wandered down to the railroad tracks—and there’re a lot of them in Des Moines—and wound up in a gloomy old Plains inn of a hotel by the locomotive roundhouse, and spent a long day sleeping on a big clean hard white bed with dirty remarks carved in the wall beside my pillow and the beat yellow windowshades pulled over the smoky scene of the railyards. A tormented composer. . And here for the first time in my life I saw my beloved Mississippi River, dry in the summer haze, low water, with its big rank smell that smells like the raw body of America itself because it washes it up. Marylou was jumping off the couch; Dean had dispatched the occupant of the apartment to the kitchen, probably to make coffee, while he proceeded with his love-problems, for to him sex was the one and only holy and important thing in life, although he had to sweat and curse to make a living and so on. Then I dressed and off we flew to New York to meet some girls. Meanwhile Dean had gotten a job in a parking lot, had a fight with Marylou in their Hoboken apartment—God knows why they went there—and she was so mad and so down deep vindictive that she reported to the police some false trumped-up hysterical crazy charge, and Dean had to lam from Hoboken. Now he’d bought a new suit to go back in; blue with pencil stripes, vest and all—eleven dollars on Third Avenue, with a watch and watch chain, and a portable typewriter with which he was going to start writing in a Denver rooming house as soon as he got a job there. But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things. This clash of interpretations is because Kerouac wasn’t writing an adventure story, as it is often read, but a character study of one of the most interesting individuals in modern literature. I arrived in Chi quite early in the morning, got a room in the Y, and went to bed with a very few dollars in my pocket. From that moment on I saw very little of Dean, and I was a little sorry too. . I walked down to the river, and I had to ride back to New York in a bus with a delegation of schoolteachers coming back from a weekend in the mountains—chatter-chatter blah-blah, and me swearing for all the time and the money I’d wasted, and telling myself, I wanted to go west and here I’ve been all day and into the night going up and down, north and south, like something that can’t get started. Please try again. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. “Besides,” said the man, “there’s no traffic passes through 6. Once the initial excitement of the beat style passes one looks for something of substance but there is none to be found. He came right out to Paterson, New Jersey, where I was living with my aunt, and one night while I was studying there was a knock on the door, and there was Dean, bowing, shuffling obsequiously in the dark of the hall, and saying, “Hel-lo, you remember me—Dean Moriarty? It was a warm and beautiful day for hitchhiking. If you were a teenager in the 1960s then you had to read this. A young man goes to extremes to save his daughter. And I swore I’d be in Chicago tomorrow, and made sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn’t give a damn, just as long as I’d be in Chicago tomorrow.3It was an ordinary bus trip with crying babies and hot sun, and countryfolk getting on at one Penn town after another, till we got on the plain of Ohio and really rolled, up by Ashtabula and straight across Indiana in the night. Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. And the new truckdriver was as crazy as the other and yelled just as much, and all I had to do was lean back and roll on. The bond between the boy and his girl endures through many hardships. That night we all drank beer and pulled wrists and talked till dawn, and in the morning, while we sat around dumbly smoking butts from ashtrays in the gray light of a gloomy day, Dean got up nervously, paced around, thinking, and decided the thing to do was to have Marylou make breakfast and sweep the floor. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 12, 2014. On the Road: The Original Scroll (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition), Jack Kerouac: Road Novels 1957-1960: On the Road / The Dharma Bums / The Subterraneans / Tristessa / Lonesome Traveler / Journal Selections (Library of America), My Name is Nelson: Pretty Much the Best Novel Ever, "An authentic work of art . He balled the jack and told stories for a couple of hours, then, at a town in Iowa where years later Dean and I were stopped on suspicion in what looked like a stolen Cadillac, he slept a few hours in the seat. A hotrod kid came by with his scarf flying. I was forty miles north of New York; all the way up I’d been worried about the fact that on this, my big opening day, I was only moving north instead of the so-longed-for west.