Inspired by Jack Kerouac's adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naiveté and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up. Jack Kerouac was an American novelist and a pioneer of the Beat Generation. During World War II, Kerouac served in the United States Merchant Marine; during his service he completed his first novel, though it would not be published until over forty years after his death. His first book to be published was The Town and the City, but he only achieved widespread fame and notoriety with the publication of his second novel, On the Road, in 1957. On the Road made Kerouac a beat icon, and he would publish twelve more novels during his life, in addition to numerous poetry volumes.