Turn-By-Turn Driving Directions For the 17,527 Miles Traveled in Jack Kerouac’s Beat Novel ‘On The Road’

German student Gregor Weichbrodt created On the Road for 17527 Miles, a driving manual based on the 1957 beat novel On the Road by Jack Kerouac. With it motorists can access the locations from the novel using turn-by-turn directions provided by Google Maps’ Direction Service API.

The exact and approximate spots Kerouac traveled and described are taken from the book and parsed by Google Direction Service API. The result is a huge direction instruction of 55 pages. The chapters match those of the original book. All in all, as Google shows, the journey takes 272.26 hours (for 17,527 miles).

On the Road for 17527 Miles can be viewed online, and is also available as an ebook, or in print as a paperback through Lulu. The directions are text-only.

Kerouac’s novel is considered classic American literature, and the foundation of the beat and counterculture generations. It was hailed as one of Time‘s All-TIME 100 Novels in 2010.

image via Gregor Weichbrodt

via Open Culture