The Duluoz Legend Series

Kerouac's classic fictional tribute to Neal Cassady. Many years before its first unabridged publication, 'Visions of Cody' became an underground classic. Written by Kerouac at his creative zenith, the book is a celebration of the life of Neal Cassady, his great friend and inspiration. Appearing here as Cody Pomeray, Cassady was also immortalised as Dean Moriarty in 'On the Road'. The son of a drunken Denver drop-out, brought up homeless and motherless during the Depression, Cassady lived his life raw -- hustling in pool halls, stealing cars for marathon joy rides across the States, living wild and penniless amongst society's misfits and outcasts. He left a sizzling reputation in his wake, becoming the insane Beat Demon of San Francisco. Through him Kerouac created one of the few lasting heroes of 20th-century literature and established himself in the great tradition of American letters.

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.

The legendary 1951 scroll draft of "On the Road" is now published as Kerouac originally composed it: rougher, wilder, and more provocative than the official work that was released, heavily edited, in 1957.

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.

Told through the character of Kerouac's fictional alter ego, Jack Duluoz, the novel tells the story of his childhood in Massachusetts. A clever and rebellious boy, Jack creates an imaginary world of strange, new possibilities.

"His life...ended when he was nine and the nuns of St. Louis de France Parochial School were at his bedside to take down his dying words because they'd heard his astonishing revelations of heaven delivered in catechism on no more encouragement than it was his turn to speak...."Unique among Jack Kerouac's novels, Visions of Gerard focuses on the scenes and sensations of childhood—the wisdom, anguish, intensity, innocence, evil, insight, suffering, delight, and shock—as they were revealed in the short tragic-happy life of his saintly brother, Gerard. Set in Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, it is an unsettling, beautiful, and sad exploration of the meaning and precariousness of existence.

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,

Following the explosive energy of On the Road comes The Dharma Bums in which Kerouac charts the spiritual quest of a group of friends in search of Dharma or Truth. Ray Smith and his friend Japhy, along with Morley the yodeller, head off into the high Sierras to seek the lesson of solitude and experience the Zen way of life. But in wildly bohemian San Francisco, with its poetry jam sessions, marathon drinking bouts and experiments in 'yabyum', they find the ascetic route distinctly hard to follow.

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.”