The book contains a detailed introduction about the creation of this novel. Bob Dylan paid rich tributes to this novel when he said, “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s”. The introduction is prepared by Ann Charters who started collecting books written by Beat writers when she was a graduate student at Columbia University. She was part of the audience which had gathered to listen to Allen Ginsberg when he gave the second public reading of ‘Howl’. After completing her doctorate, she worked with Jack Kerouac to compile his bibliography. She is the one who first wrote the biography of Jack Kerouac (pronounced as care-ooo-ack) The introduction begins with the description of Joyce Johnson and Kerouac waiting near a newsstand on the midnight of September 4th, 1957 for the New York Times. Jack was informed that the review of his novel ‘On the Road’ will appear in that day’s newspaper. Standing under a street lamp, they read the review which described ‘On the Road’ as ‘an authentic work of art’ which is ‘beautifully executed’ and contains ‘the clearest and most important utterance’... ‘of the beat generation’. Jack Kerouac was described as the ‘principal avatar’ of the Beat generation. The ‘Village Voice Reviewer’ describes the book as ‘the rallying cry for the elusive spirit of rebellion of these times.’ The introduction continues to describe the way the novel was written. ‘On the Road’ is all about how Kerouac found ‘a personal voice’ and he was thirty-five years old when the novel was published. Just like Benyamin met Najib and wrote The Goat Days, Kerouac met Neal Cassady who is the inspiration for his character Dean Moriarty. The first version of the novel was a cheap imitation of the style of Theodore Dreiser. Kerouac wanted the novel to be a quest novel like Cerventes’s ‘Don Quixote’ and John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’.
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