Happy Birthday ON THE ROAD! In On the Road, his first successful novel—published 50 years ago today, on September 5, 1957—Jack Kerouac introduced the character of Sal Paradise, a writer and drifter who bore a strong resemblance to Jack Kerouac. Paradise was a seeker, a philosopher, a lover of women, a sometime thief, a beat angel of the restless American night. Then there was his sidekick, Dean Moriarty. He was a beat angel of the restless American night too, only more so. Together they crossed and recrossed this mad continent of visions and hopes and promises and broken dreams, from sad New Jersey to holy Denver to soulful San Francisco to solemn New York, digging jazz and girls and marijuana and Kierkegaard and Chicago street scenes and Arizona mountains and Texas cowboys, in cars and highways and parties and love affairs, with beat jobs and flophouse benzedrine conversation and cheap diner meals and run-on sentences filled with mergedtogether words that conveyed their frantic desperation to live, to experience, to grow and learn and fight and love and just plain go in postwar atombomb America.