KEROUAC, Jack [Bob Dylan].
On The Road.
"The musical heir to Kerouac’s literary ethos": First Edition of Jack Kerouac's On The Road; signed by Bob Dylan
New York: The Viking Press, 1957.
$40,000.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-148707
* Custom Clamshell Boxes are hand made by the Harcourt Bindery upon request and take approximately 60 days to complete
First edition of Kerouac's classic novel. Octavo, original black cloth, top stain red. Boldly signed on the front free endpaper by one of the greatest songwriters of all-time, Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan was heavily influenced by Jack Kerouac and the broader Beat Generation, whose literary innovations helped shape Dylan's early lyrical and aesthetic sensibilities. Dylan himself has stated that Kerouac's On the Road “changed my life like it changed everyone else's,” a testament to the novel’s seismic cultural impact and its particular resonance for a young artist in search of poetic voice and artistic direction. What captivated Dylan was not only Kerouac’s vision of America as a vast, restless landscape of spiritual possibility, but also his language—what Dylan described as "breathless, dynamic, bop phrases" that pulsed with spontaneity and improvisation. Kerouac’s prose rhythm, derived from jazz and infused with a sense of urgency and improvisation, found a natural echo in Dylan’s own songwriting, particularly in longer, surrealistic compositions like “Desolation Row,” where the spirit of Beat disillusionment and mythmaking is palpable. Although Dylan never met Kerouac, his reverence was enduring. In 1975, during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour, Dylan and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg—another central figure in Dylan's intellectual formation—visited Kerouac’s grave together, a symbolic gesture that underscored Dylan’s connection to the literary lineage of the Beats. Very good in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by Bill English. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box by the Harcourt Bindery. Rare and desirable signed by the musical heir to Kerouac’s literary ethos.
The raucous, exuberant, often wildly funny account of a journey through America and Mexico, Jack Kerouac's On the Road instantly defined a generation on its publication in 1957: it was, in the words of a New York Times reviewer, "the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat.'" Written in the mode of ecstatic improvisation that Allen Ginsberg described as "spontaneous bop prosody," Kerouac's novel remains electrifying in its thirst for experience and its defiant rebuke of American conformity. In his portrayal of the fervent relationship between the writer Sal Paradise and his outrageous, exasperating, and inimitable friend Dean Moriarty, Kerouac created one of the great friendships in American literature; and his rendering of the cities and highways and wildernesses that his characters restlessly explore are a hallucinatory travelogue of a nation he both mourns and celebrates. "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). It is the basis for the 2012 film featuring Garrett Hedlund, Sam Riley, Kristen Stewart, Alice Braga, Amy Adams, Tom Sturridge, Danny Morgan, Elisabeth Moss, Kirsten Dunst, and Viggo Mortensen. The executive producers were Francis Ford Coppola, Patrick Batteux, Jerry Leider, and Tessa Ross. Named by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century and on TIME Magazine's list of the 100 best English language novels from 1923-2005.
On The Road.
$40,000.00
In Stock
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