Five decades after it was first published, Jack Kerouac's seminal beat novel "On the Road" finally finds its way to the big screen, in a production from award-winning director Walter Salles ("Motorcycle Diaries") starring Sam Riley ("Control, Brighton Rock"), Garret Hedlund ("Friday Night Lights"), [...]
Another addition to Penguin Modern Classics' key Kerouac holdings.
Two ebullient young men search for Truth the Zen way: from marathon wine-drinking bouts, poetry jam sessions, and "yabyum" in San Francisco's Bohemia to solitude in the high Sierras and a vigil atop Desolation Peak in [...]
The Subterraneans haunt the bars and clubs of San Francisco, surviving on a diet of booze and benzedrine, Proust and Verlaine. Living amongst them is Leo, an aspiring writer, and Mardou, half-Indian, half-Negro, beautiful and neurotic. Their bitter-sweet and ill-starred love affair sees Kerouac at h[...]
As he roams the US, Mexico, Morocco, Paris and London, Kerouac records life on the road in prose of pure poetry. Standing on the engine of a train as it rushes past fields of prickly cactus; witnessing his first bullfight in Mexico while high on opium; meditating on a sunlit roof in Tangiers or fall[...]
"On the Road" chronicles Jack Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassady, "a sideburned hero of the snowy West." As "Sal Paradise" and "Dean Moriarty," the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience. Kerouac's love of America, his compa[...]
Never before published in Kerouac's lifetime, this 1955 biography of the founder of Buddhism is a clear and powerful study of Siddartha Gautama's life and works. "Wake Up" recounts the story of Prince Siddhartha's royal upbringing and his father's wish to protect him from all human suffering, despit[...]
In 1944, the authors, then still unknown writers, were both arrested following a murder: one of their friends had stabbed another and then come to them for advice - neither had told the police. This book is an insight into the lives and literary development of two great writers.[...]
Moodily atmospheric, full of verve and energy, "Maggie Cassidy" is Kerouac's poignant tale of teenage romance in New England. The story of Jack and Maggie, in love with the idea of being in love, looking ahead to marriage with hope and trepidation, is told with touching simplicity. It skillfully cap[...]
Described by Kerouac as being about "man's simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies", the 158-page handwritten manuscript was Kerouac's first novel, but was not published during his lifetime. He wrote in his notes for the project that the ch[...]
His first novel is a revelation ...the writing is vivid, serious and extraordinary ...wonderful". ("The Times"). "The Sea is My Brother" is Jack Kerouac's very first novel, begun shortly after his tour as a merchant sailor in 1942. Lost during his lifetime, it is an intense portrait of friendship an[...]
The tale of Kerouac's alter-ego, "Vanity of Duluoz" presents Jack Duluoz's high school experiences as a sporting jock in Massachusetts and his time at Columbia University on a football scholarship. Just as Jack's glamorous new adult life begins, so does World War II, and he joins the US Navy to trav[...]
An experimental novel which remained unpublished for years, "Visions of Cody" is Kerouac's fascinating examination of his own New York life, in a collection of colourful stream-of-consciousness essays. Transcribing taped conversations between members of their group as they took drugs and drank, this[...]
This semi-autobiographical tale of Kerouac's own trip to France, to trace his ancestors and explore his own understanding of the Buddhism that came to define his beliefs, contains some of Kerouac's most lyrical descriptions. From his reports of the strangers he meets and the all-night conversations [...]
Jack Kerouac called Doctor Sax, the enigmatic figure who haunted his boyhood imagination, 'my ghost, personal angel, private shadow, secret lover'. In this extraordinary autobiographical account of growing up in Lowell, Massachusetts, told through his fictional alter ego Jack Duluoz, he mingles real[...]
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[...]
"Desolation Angels" is the wild and soulful story of the legendary road trip that Jack Kerouac took before the publication of "On the Road", told through the persona of Jack Duluoz and accompanied by his thinly-disguised Beat cohorts Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs. As they hitch[...]
In 1944, twenty-two year old Jack Kerouac lost a novella-length manuscript called The Haunted Life. It turned up thirteen years later in a Columbia University dormitory, and then in 2002, at a Sotheby's auction house. Now, 70 years after Kerouac wrote it, his second novel will be published for the f[...]
A previously unpublished compilation of poetry by the late Beat Generation author of On the Road records his wanderings around America, offering observations, meditations, and travelogues in a series of prose poems that discuss his travels to New York, North Carolina, San Francisco, Denver, Kansas, [...]
A masterful anthology of more than five hundred haiku poems by one of the leaders of the Beat Generation and author of On the Road explores Kerouac's experimentation with the concise poetic form as examples appeared in his journals, sketchbooks, recordings, notebooks, letters, and fiction. Original.[...]
"The Dharma Bums" was published one year after "On the Road" made Jack Kerouac a celebrity and a spokesperson for the Beat Generation. Sparked by his contagious zest for life, the novel relates the adventures of an ebullient group of Beatnik seekers in a freewheeling exploration of Buddhism and the [...]
The legendary 1951 scroll draft of "On the Road," published as Kerouac originally composed it
IN THREE WEEKS in April of 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote his first full draft of "On the Road"--typed as a single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing paper, which he later taped together to form[...]
Jack Kerouac's profound meditations on the Buddha's life and religion
In the mid-1950s, Jack Kerouac, a lifelong Catholic, became fascinated with Buddhism, an interest that had a significant impact on his ideas of spirituality and later found expression in such books as "Mexico City Blues" and "[...]
Written some time after his best-known works, "Big Sur" follows Jack Kerouac's comedown from his carefree youth and unwanted fame, presenting his mature confrontation of some of his most troubling emotional issues.
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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.
Jack Kerouac's groundbreaking novel--soon to be a major motion picture with a star-[...]