This sprawling saga follows an artist's life journey across America and the world, a profound exploration of freedom and the search for meaning through constant movement. It captures the spirit of the Beat Generation, offering deep insights into the soul of a creative individual. Immerse yourself in a whirlwind of jazz, drugs, and philosophical musings.
Written during 1951-52, this novel was an underground legend by the time it was finally published in 1972. Written in an experimental form, Kerouac created the ultimate account of his voyages with Neal Cassady, which he captured in a different form for On the Road.
Leo Percepied, aspiring writer and self-styled free-wheeling bum, gravitates to the Subterraneans, impoverished intellectuals who haunt the bars and clubs of San Francisco, surviving on a diet of booze and benzedrine, Proust and Verlaine. Living among them is Mardou Fox, beautiful and a little crazy, whose dark eyes, full of suffering and sweetness, find recognition in Leo. But, afraid of his growing involvement, Leo sets out to destroy their love. Exuberant and melancholy, Kerouac's spontaneous prose flows across the pages. Written in three days, The Subterraneans is, like all Kerouac's work, closely related to his own life while encapsulating his great vision of America.
Die Geschichte von Kerouacs Alter Ego Jack Duluoz erzählt von dessen High-School-Erlebnissen in Massachusetts und seiner Zeit als Football-Stipendiat an der Columbia Universität. Gerade als Jack in sein glamouröses Erwachsenenleben ausbrechen will, bricht auch der Zweite Weltkrieg aus, Jack tritt der US Navy bei und bereist die Welt. Während er Erfahrungen sammelt, erkennt er die Grenzen seiner ursprünglichen Pläne und kehrt zurück nach New York, wo die Beat-Bewegung gerade ihren Anfang nimmt, zurück in einen Tumult aus Drogen, Sex und wahnhaftem Schreiben.
The town in this tale is Galloway, Masachusetts, birthplace of the five sons and three daughters of the Martin family in the early 1900s. The city is New York, the heaving melting pot which lures them all in search of futures and identity.
On The Road, the most famous of Jack Kerouac's works, is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers, and fellow travelers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of Kerouac's alter-egos, On the Road is a cross-country bohemian odyssey that not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication but penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture. MAXnotes offer a fresh look at masterpieces of literature, presented in a lively and interesting fashion. Written by literary experts who currently teach the subject, MAXnotes will enhance your understanding and enjoyment of the work. MAXnotes are designed to stimulate independ ent thought about the literary work by raising various issues and thought-provoking ideas and questions. MAXnotes cover the essentials of what one should know about each work, including an overall summary, character lists, an explanation and discussion of the plot, the work's historical context, illustrations to convey the mood of the work, and a biography of the author. Each chapter is individually summarized and analyzed, and has study questions and answers.
Before Jack Kerouac expressed the spirit of a generation in his 1957 classic, On the Road, he spent years figuring out how he wanted to live and, above all, learning how to write. Atop an Underwood brings together more than sixty previously unpublished works that Kerouac wrote before he was twenty-two, ranging from stories and poems to plays and parts of novels, including an excerpt from his 1943 merchant marine novel, The Sea Is My Brother. These writings reveal what Kerouac was thinking, doing, and dreaming during his formative years, and reflect his primary literary influences. Readers will also find in these works the source of Kerouac's spontaneous prose style. Uncovering a fascinating missing link in Kerouac's development as a writer, Atop an Underwood is essential reading for Kerouac fans, scholars, and critics.
Beautifully rejacketed, Doctor Sax is one of Kerouac’s best books – a vivid, nostalgic tale of one boy’s extraordinary childhood. Of all his books, Doctor Sax was the one Jack Kerouac loved the most. He began writing it in 1948, but wrote the greater part of it in 1952, when he was staying in Mexico with William Burroughs. Told through the character of Kerouac’s fictional alter ego, Jack Duluoz, the novel tells the story of his extraordinary childhood in Massachusetts. A clever and rebellious boy, playing among the river weeds and railroad tracks, going to the movies, reading pulp comics and watching cartoons, Jack creates an imaginary world of strange, new possibilities. Within this world lies the weird and wonderful Doctor Sax…
'The piteousness of his little soft shroud of hair falling down his brow and swept aside by the hand over blue serious eyes' Described by Kerouac as 'my most serious sad and true book', Visions of Gerard forms the first volume of his memoir cycle the 'Duluoz Legend'. Based on Jack Kerouac's memories of the beloved older brother who died when he was a boy, it is unique among his novels for its dreamlike evocation of the sensations of childhood - its wisdom, anguish, intensity, innocence, joy and pain. It is a haunting exploration of the precariousness of existence. 'Called a "pain-tale" by Kerouac, it's the story of an almost divine, Buddha-like child wracked with sickness and suffering' Guardian
Satori is the Japanese word for sudden awakening or illumination. This autobiographical novel is an odyssey of discovery. It is also an insight into Kerouac's introduction to the eastern mysticism that was to become a lifelong passion.
Written over the course of three days and three nights, The Subterraneans was generated out of the same ecstatic flash of inspiration that produced another one of Kerouac's early classic, On The Road. Centering on the tempestous breakup of Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox--two denizens of the 1950s San Francsico underground--The Subterraneans is a tale of dark alleys and dark rooms, of artists, of visionaries,
A deluxe edition of Kerouac's 1958 classic Published just one year after On The Road, this is the story of two men enganged in a passionate search for Dharma or truth. Their major adventure is the pursuit of the Zen Way, which takes them climbing into the High Sierras to seek the lesson of solitude. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Her name means sadness, yet Tristessa, a prostitute and morphine addict, lives without cares in her shabby room with a menagerie of pets and an altar to the Virgin Mary. Based on Jack Kerouac's own real-life love affair in Mexico city, this is the story of a man's ill-fated relationship with a woman he portrays with tenderness and dignity, even as her life spirals out of control.
Vanity of Duluoz is a key volume in Jack Kerouac's lifework, the series of autobiographical novels he referred to as The Legend of Duluoz. With the same tender humor and intoxicating wordplay he brought to his masterpieces On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Kerouac takes his alter ego from the football fields of small-town New England to the playing fields and classrooms of Horace Mann and Columbia, out to sea on a merchant freighter plying the sub-infested waters of the North Atlantic during World War II, and back to New York, where his friends are the writers who would one day become known as the Beat generation and where he publishes his first novel.
The classic autobiographical novel, “one of the most true, comic, and grizzly journeys in American literature” (Time), from acclaimed author Jack Kerouac “If the Pulitzer Prize were given for the book that is most representative of American life, I would nominate Desolation Angels.”—Dan Wakefield, The Atlantic Desolation Angels covers a key year in Jack Kerouac’s life—the period that led up to the publication of On the Road in September of 1957. After spending two months in the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington, Kerouac’s fictional self Jack Duluoz comes down from the isolated mountains to the wild excitement of the bars, jazz clubs, and parties of San Francisco, before traveling on to Mexico City, New York, Tangiers, Paris, and London. Duluoz attempts to extricate himself from the world but fails, for one must “live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.” Desolation Angels is quintessential Kerouac.
'A very unique cat-a French-Canadian Hinayana Buddhist Beat Catholic savant'Allen Ginsberg Through publishers stopped Maggie Cassidy'sJack Dulouz and On the Road'sSal Paradise form sharing the same name, Kerouac meant the books to be two parts of the same life. While On the Roadmade Paradise (and Kerouac) a hero of the disaffected and restless for generations to come, Maggie Cassidyis an affectionate portrait of the teenager that made the man - of friendship and first love - growing up in a New England mill town. Dulouz is a high school athletics and football star who meet Maggie Cassidy and begins a devoted, inconstant, tender adolescent love affair. It is one of the most sustained, poetic pieces of Kerouac's 'spontaneous prose'.
A poignant masterpiece of wrenching personal expression from the acclaimed author of On the Road “In many ways, particularly in the lyrical immediacy that is his distinctive glory, this is Kerouac’s best book . . . certainly he has never displayed more ‘gentle sweetness.’”—San Francisco Chronicle Jack Kerouac’s alter ego Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of balance. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, Big Sur “reveals consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion.”
