Jack Kerouac's last published work is an endearing portrayal of brotherhood and the classic American road trip adventure, viewed through the eyes of a young boy.

This novella tells the story of a ten-year-old Black boy named Pictorial Review "Pic" Jackson, who lives with his grandfather in North Carolina in the 1940s. After his grandfather dies and Pic is living with another relative, his older brother, Slim, shows up to take him out of that dysfunctional home, and they journey from the rural South to New York City.

They head for Harlem, where Slim lives with his girlfriend and where Pic sees firsthand the economic hard times his brother is experiencing. After losing job after job, Slim sends his pregnant girlfriend off to San Francisco to live with her sister. Then the brothers set out to hitchhike their way west, making their way to California across a country suffused with danger, music, love, and hardship.

Told from the point of view of Pic, Kerouac wrote this work in a dialect that is stereotypical for Black American youth of that era.