A car hurtles west across the American night and the sentences try to keep up, breathless, unpunctuated, alive. Jack Kerouac typed the first draft on a single scroll of taped-together paper in April 1951, three weeks of sustained improvisation fueled by coffee and Benzedrine, though the novel would not see print until 1957 after years of revision. Dean Moriarty, modeled on Neal Cassady, is pure kinetic energy, a saint of velocity who crosses the continent the way a flame crosses a fuse. The book gave a generation permission to move, to reject the suburb and the salary and the settled life. Beneath the ecstasy there is loneliness, immense and American, the silence that waits at the end of every road.