Sal Paradise
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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 the 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.
[edit] 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 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier.
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