The Amazing Race is an American adventure reality game show in which 11 or 12 teams of two race around the world. The race is split into legs, with each leg requiring teams to deduce clues, navigate themselves in foreign areas, interact with locals, perform physical and mental challenges, and travel by airplane, boat, taxi, and other public transportation options on a limited budget provided by the show.

The two main characters of the book are the narrator, Sal Paradise, and his friend Dean Moriarty, much admired for his carefree attitude and sense of adventure, a free-spirited maverick eager to explore all kicks and an inspiration and catalyst for Sal's travels. The novel contains five parts, three of them describing road trips with Dean. The narrative takes place in the years 1947 to 1950, is full of Americana, and marks a specific era in jazz history, "somewhere between its Charlie Parker Ornithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis" (Pt. 1, Ch. 3). The novel is largely autobiographical, Sal being the alter ego of the author and Dean standing for Neal Cassady. Like Kerouac, Sal Paradise is a writer who published two books over the course of the plot, even though the names are not known.