Ray Smith is a coast-to-coast, freight-hopping poet and drifter, at odds with urban life and middle-class existence ("all that dumb white machinery in the kitchen"). He meets a kindred spirit in Japhy Rider, a Buddhist drop-out, who enlists Ray into a regime of crazy, purifying hikes up the peaks of the High Sierra and non-stop Zen Free Love Lunacy orgies. 'Two dissimilar monks on the one path', their haphazard, often hilarious search for the contentment of "dharma", Buddhism's all-pervading, supreme principle of life, is pure Kerouac.
First published in 1959, this book's cry for 'great rucksack revolution' in which the country's youth would cast off the everyday, take to the open road and live the Buddhist way, inspired a whole generation of post-war Americans to search for spiritual knowledge and self-transcendence.
