Published in 1957, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is the seminal beat generation novel. I’ve always loved how it mythologizes outsiders, groovy dreamers who live outside staid, conformist society.

According to legend, Kerouac wrote it in three weeks, fueled by coffee and benzedrine. (In reality he revised quite a bit, and had written preparatory material for years.)

An excerpt:

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…”

Unfortunately for Jack, he lived a little too madly. He died in 1969, at age 47, of complications from alcoholism. But On the Road is still being read. A recent check of its Amazon ranking put the book at #1,063 – an astonishingly high rank for a book that gets no fresh publicity.