Want to learn the ideas in On The Road better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of On The Road by Jack Kerouac here.

Read a brief 1-Page Summary or watch video summaries curated by our expert team. Note: this book guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher or author, and we always encourage you to purchase and read the full book.

Video Summaries of On The Road

We’ve scoured the Internet for the very best videos on On The Road, from high-quality videos summaries to interviews or commentary by Jack Kerouac.

1-Page Summary of On The Road

Overall Summary

Part 1, Chapter 1

Sal Paradise recalls how he started to live a life on the road after meeting Dean Moriarty, who was looking for someone to teach him about philosophy and other intellectual topics. He had met Chad King, who knew of Dean from his letters while in reform school. Sal describes Dean as an old-fashioned Western hero type, but with a dark side that made Marylou look like “a sweet woman” despite her being “dumb and capable of doing horrible things.”

Dean asked Chad King to teach him how to write and Chad told him that he should ask Sal instead since Sal was a writer. After getting in a fight with Marylou, Dean ran away from the police and showed up on Sal’s doorstep one night (Sal lived with his Aunt in New Jersey). He wanted to learn how to write so he could impress Marylou. The two went out drinking that night and Dean promised that they would travel together some day, though he didn’t know when.

Sal says that while Dean was in California before coming to New York, he spent a third of his time playing pool and a third in jail. He also spent some time at the library—a place where he met Carlo Marx, who is described as “sorrowful” and “poetic.”

Dean and Carlo hit it off right away, and Sal ended up following them as they rushed down the street. He says that he only finds interesting people who are “the mad ones,” those who are “mad to live,” etc. For about two weeks, Sal didn’t see Dean or Carlo because they became fast friends.

In the spring, Sal’s friends Dean and Carlo went on trips to the west. They took a picture together before they left and cut it in half so that each of them kept one part. Sal then also went out west at a later date and had his own experience.

Sal says that he went after Dean because he reminded him of a brother. He says all his friends were either intellectuals or criminals, but that Dean was different in the sense that he had intelligence. Sal felt an urge to follow him out west and be with people like himself.

Part 1, Chapter 2

In 1947, Sal was ready to go west. He had saved up fifty dollars and an old friend invited him to San Francisco. The half-finished manuscript of his book stayed with his aunt’s family.

Sal saw on a map that Route 6 went all the way from Cape Cod to Los Angeles. He decided to travel north and get on this road, and stay on it until he reached his destination of LA. After leaving New York City, Sal got into trouble in Bear Mountain Bridge because it was raining hard when he arrived there.

Sal was upset about having to go back the way he came. He thought of all his friends in California, who were probably having a good time without him. A car picked him up and took him to Newburgh. The driver told Sal that Route 6 wasn’t the best route, so he’d have to take another road—Route 80—to get to Pittsburgh. Sal felt like he had wasted money on gas, but swore that if it meant getting home sooner, then it would be worth it.

Part 1, Chapter 3

Sal took a bus through Pennsylvania and Ohio all the way to Chicago. He walked around the city, thinking about how his friends from one end of the country to another were really all in the same vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing-about. Sal then got on a bus out of Chicago and started hitchhiking again. A woman picked him up and drove him all the way to Iowa, where he saw Mississippi River for first time in his life. Stopped in a small town in Iowa, Sal ate apple pie and ice cream at a bus station restaurant. He notes that this was practically all he ate during his trip westward because he didn’t have much money with him at that point. Sal took another bus as far as Des Moines before getting picked up by truck driver who drove him further west until they reached Omaha, Nebraska—the final stop before reaching California’s coast line. The next morning when he woke up, Sal says that it felt like someone else had taken over his body while he slept; it felt like waking up from an alternate reality into yet another new world altogether: “I did not know who I was or where I was going”—a feeling very similar to what many people experience when leaving their hometowns behind for college or work elsewhere