On the Road | Literary Precedents
In its episodic treatment of incidents and in the portrayal of the rogue-saint Dean Moriarty, On the Road may be described as a picaresque novel. Its immediate literary predecessors are the profane confessional works of Henry Miller and the brooding, emotionally charged novels of Thomas Wolfe.
As Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) depicts the generation lost in the wake of the Great War, so does On the Road give voice to the generation "beat" after World War II. A major difference is that Hemingway's characters are cynical exiles, trapped in the ruins of...
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