"In Why Kerouac Matters, John Leland embarks on a discussion of On the Road, arguing that it still matters because at its core it is full of lessons about how to grow up. Leland's focus is on Sal Paradise, the Kerouac alter ego, who has always been overshadowed by his fictional running buddy Dean Moriarty. Leland examines the lessons that Paradise absorbs and dispenses on his novelistic journey to manhood, and how those lessons - about work and money, love and sex, art and holiness - still reverberate today. He shows how On the Road is a primer for male friendship and the cultivation of traditional family values, and contends that the stereotype of the two wild and crazy guys obscures the novel's core themes of the search for atonement, redemption and divine revelation."--BOOK JACKET.