Sal Paradise

Sal Paradise is the narrator and the protagonist in Jack Kerouac's novel "On the Road". Sal, an Italian-American youth living in New Jersey with his aunt, is an uninspired writer working on a book who follows and accompanies Dean Moriarty, a young and reckless Denver vagrant, on his journeys across America and describes his trips with and without Dean in search of kicks.

"On the Road" is known as a semi-autobiographic story, and Kerouac admitted himself being Sal Paradise, when journalists asked him if he was Dean Moriarty, who was actually inspired by another Beat hero and a close friend of Kerouac, Neal Cassady. Indeed, the connections between Sal and Kerouac are significant. Jack, coming from a French origin himself, created Sal as an Italian-American based on his life; while Sal lives with his aunt in New Jersey, Kerouac lived with his mother in New York.

In Popular Culture

The first song "Stuck Between Stations" by "The Hold Steady" on the album "Boys and Girls in America" starts with the lyric, "There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right / Boys and Girls in America, they have such a sad time together." Sal Paradise was also the name of an indie rock band on Tooth & Nail Records in the mid 1990s, and he is mentioned in a song by singer-songwriter Pete Wylie, who quotes, "The city intellectuals of the world are divorced from the full bodied blood-of-the-land and are just rootless fools."

A story, as written by "Sal Paradyse", appears in Alan Moore's "".