Easton Press leather edition of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," one of the GREAT BOOKS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY series, Illustrated by Jonathan Talbot, published in 2001.  Bound in hunter green leather, the book has  moire silk end leaves, hubbed spine, satin book marker, acid-free paper, gold gilt on three edges---in FINE condition---NEW in SHRINK WRAP. Jack Kerouac, who lived from 1922---1969, was a novelist and "father of the Beat Generation." Kerouac grew up in a French Canadian working class family in Lowell, Massachusetts.  He starred in football in high school and was awarded a scholarship to attend COLUMBIA University in New York City. Kerouac was "drop dead handsome" and was pursued by both women and men. Kerouac was a hero to youth who rejected middle-class values. "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time," he wrote in "On the Road," a novel he completed in only three weeks but had to wait seven years to see published. When it finally appeared in 1957, it immediately became a basic text for youth who found their country claustrophobic and oppressive. At the same time, it was a spontaneous and passionate celebration of the country itself. The Beat Generation, originally regarded as a bizarre bohemian phenomenon confined to small coteries in San Francisco and New York, spilled over into the general culture in the 1960s. His subject was himself and he wrote as spontaneously as possible, refusing to revise or rewrite. Truman Capote called Kerouac's method of composition typing, not writing. But Allen Ginsberg, who regarded his friend as the greatest American poet of his time, declared that Kerouac had created "a spontaneous bop prosody." Ginsberg appears in Kerouac novels under a variety of names--Carlo Marx, Irwin Garden, Adam Moorad and Alvah Goldbook--but is always immediately recognizable. This is true of all Mr. Kerouac's close friends, for there was little fiction in his novels.  Giving up football cost him his scholarship to Columbia, but World War II would have interrupted his studies in any case. He served first in the merchant marine, then briefly in the Navy, from which he was discharged as "a schizoid personality."  He returned to New York and became close friends with Allen Ginsberg, then a Columbia undergraduate, and William Burroughs, the scion of a wealthy St. Louis family. Kerouac was later to give them the titles of their best-known works--"Howl" and "Naked Lunch." In those years, Kerouac was constantly on the move, from New York to Denver, then on to San Francisco, down to Mexico City, and back to New York. This was his discovery of America, the basis for "On the Road." Much of his traveling was done in the company of a young drifter from Denver named Neal Cassady, who had a hunger for experience and a taste also for theology and literature. Inevitably, he became a main character of "On the Road."  The word "beat," Kerouac once said, was first used by a friend to signify the feelings of despair and nearness to an apocalypse that impelled them to reach out for new experiences. The novelist later coined the phrase "beat generation," sometimes explaining that he took "beat" to mean "beatific." Kerouac later delved Into Buddhism. He called himself "a religious wanderer"--or "dharma bum." Allen Ginsberg said he was "a very unique cat--a French Canadian Hinayana Buddhist Beat Catholic savant." I offer combined shipping.