On the Road

On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across America. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use. The novel, published in 1957, is a roman à clef, with many key figures in the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee), Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx) and Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac himself as the narrator Sal Paradise.

The idea for On the Road, Kerouac's second novel, was formed during the late 1940s in a series of notebooks, and then typed out on a continuous reel of paper during three weeks in April 1951. It was first published by Viking Press in 1957. After several film proposals dating from 1957, the book was finally made into a film, On the Road (2012), produced by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by Walter Salles.

Kristen Stewart

Kristen Jaymes Stewart (born April 9, 1990) is an American actress, known for playing the protagonist Bella Swan in The Twilight Saga film series from 2008–12, which has grossed over $3.3 billion worldwide. She is the "face" of Chanel and Balenciaga fashion brands.

Stewart began her career in 1999 and came to prominence playing Jodie Foster's daughter in the 2002 thriller Panic Room. She has since starred in a range of films, including Speak (2004), Zathura (2005), Into The Wild (2007), Adventureland (2009), The Runaways (2010), Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), On the Road (2012), Camp X-Ray (2014), Still Alice (2014) and Equals (2015).

Stewart was listed as the highest-earning female actress in the Vanity Fair "Hollywood Top Earners List of 2010", with an estimated earning of $28.5 million. In 2011, she was named number one on Forbes magazine's list of "Hollywood's Best Actors for the Buck".Forbes also named her as the highest paid actress in 2012, with total earnings of $34.5 million. She won the Rising Star BAFTA Award in 2010, and became the first American actress to win a Cesar Award, when she won Best Supporting Actress in 2015 for her role opposite Juliette Binoche in Clouds of Sils Maria (2014).

Garrett Hedlund

Garrett John Hedlund (born September 3, 1984) is an American actor, model and singer, known for his roles in the films Friday Night Lights (2004), Four Brothers (2005), Eragon (2006), Country Strong (2010), Unbroken (2014), for his role as Patroclus in the movie Troy (2004), as Sam Flynn in Tron: Legacy (2010), as Dean Moriarty in the film On the Road (2012), and as James Hook in Pan (2015)

Early life

Hedlund was born in Roseau, Minnesota, to Kristine Anne (née Yanish) and Robert Martin Hedlund. He is the youngest of three children, with a brother, Nathaniel, and a sister, Amanda. His father is of Swedish descent and his mother is of Norwegian and German ancestry. Hedlund was raised on a remote beef cattle farm near the small town of Wannaska, Minnesota. In the tenth grade, he moved to live with his mother in Arizona, where he saved his waiter’s tips to pay for lessons with acting coach Jean Fowler, with whom he worked on speeches and script material. He subsequently modeled for L.L. Bean and Teen magazine. In 2003, at the age of eighteen, Hedlund moved to Los Angeles to pursue his acting career.

The Road

The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed most of civilization and, in the intervening years, almost all life on Earth. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006.

The book was adapted to a film by the same name in 2009, directed by John Hillcoat.

Plot summary

An unnamed father and his young son journey across a grim post-apocalyptic landscape, some years after an unspecified disaster has caused another extinction event, destroying civilization and most life on Earth. The land is filled with ash and devoid of living animals and vegetation. Many of the remaining human survivors have resorted to cannibalism, scavenging the detritus of city and country alike for flesh. The boy's mother, pregnant with him at the time of the disaster, gave up hope and committed suicide some time before the story began, despite the father's pleas. Much of the book is written in the third person, with references to "the father" and "the son" or to "the man" and "the boy".

Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac (/ˈkɛruˌæk/ or /ˈkɛrəˌwæk/, born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist and poet.

He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. He became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements.

In 1969, aged 47, Kerouac died from internal bleeding due to long-term alcohol abuse. Since his death, Kerouac's literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published. All of his books are in print today, including The Town and the City, On the Road, Doctor Sax, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels, Visions of Cody, The Sea Is My Brother, and Big Sur.