On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

Kerouac fed a single unbroken scroll of paper through the typewriter and wrote for three weeks without pausing for paragraphs, and the prose still moves at that speed: sentences racing past the commas a calmer book would place, chasing the next town, the next all-night jazz set, the next stranger not yet worn down by ordinary life. Sal Paradise follows Dean Moriarty back and forth across the country, Denver to San Francisco to the dust of Mexico, sure that somewhere ahead waits the thing Dean calls IT, the burning holy now that justifies the gas money and the wreckage. The book loves Dean the way Sal does, his hunger and his ruin together, never pretending the two come apart. Then the final pages turn the whole ecstatic ride inside out, leaving the man who was the engine of every mile standing ragged in the cold as the car pulls away without him. What sounded like a hymn to the open road becomes a hymn to a friend you cannot keep, and to loving him at full speed anyway.