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 September 5, 1957, Jack Kerouac?s novel On The Road was published. Since then, few books have had as profound an impact on American culture. Pulsating with the rhythms of late-1940s/1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open road, Kerouac?s classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be?Beat? and has inspired generations of writers, musicians, artists, poets and seekers who cite their discovery of the book as the event that?set them free.? Based on Kerouac?s adventures with Neal Cassady, On The Road tells the story of two friends whose four cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Expressing a mixture of sad-eyed naïveté and wild abandon, and imbued with Kerouac?s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On The Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope. It changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.
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.
Tristessa is a strange fever-dream of morphine sickness and belly-deep sadness. Or, in the words of Allen Ginsberg: 'a narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a chihuahua dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junky lady, first in their crowded bedroom, then out to drunken streets, taco stands, and pads at dawn in Mexico City slums'.
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.
Maggie Cassidy , a 1959 novel by Jack Kerouac written about his times in Lowell, MA from 1938 to 1939. It chronicles Kerouac's real life relationship with teen age heart-throb Mary Carney. It is unique for Kerouac for its high school setting and teenage characters. He wrote the novel in 1953 but it was not published until 1959, after the success of On the Road .
In 1960 Jack Kerouac was near breaking point. Driven mad by constant press attention in the wake of the publication of On the Road, he needed to 'get away to solitude again or die', so he withdrew to a cabin in Big Sur on the Californian coast. The resulting novel, in which his autobiographical hero Jack Duluoz wrestles with doubt, alcohol dependency and his urge towards self-destruction, is one of Kerouac's most personal and searingly honest works. Ending with the poem 'Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur', it shows a man coming down from his hedonistic youth and trying to come to terms with fame, the world and himself.
