The Library of America's edition of the writings of Jack Kerouac opens with Visions of Cody, the ground-breaking work originally written in the early 1950s and published posthumously in 1972, in which Kerouac first treats the material later immortalised in On the Road. Visions of Gerard (1963) is a [...]
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, Kristen Stewart ("Twil[...]
The definitive Kerouac collection-now in Penguin Classics
To coincide with the 50th anniversary celebration of "On the Road," Penguin Classics republishes this landmark collection. "The Portable Jack Kerouac" made clear the ambition and accomplishment of Kerouac's "Legend of Duluoz"-the story o[...]
" An] essential Beat masterpiece." --"The Village Voice."
Perhaps one of the last great dual correspondences of the twentieth century, "Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters" reveals not only the process of creation of the two most celebrated members of the Beat Generation, but also the [...]
A deluxe collector's edition of five works by the late Beat Generation classic writer combines the eminent On the Road with the novels, The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, Tristessa, and Lonesome Traveler.[...]
It was in his letters that Jack Kerouac set down the raw material that he transmuted into his novels, exploring and refining the spontaneous prose style that became his trademark. The letters in this volume, written between 1940, when Kerouac was a freshman at college, and 1956, immediately before h[...]
The first volume of Jack Kerouac's selected letters, published in 1995, was hailed as an important and revealing addition to Kerouac scholarship. This second and final volume, comprising letters written between 1957, the year On the Road was published, and the day before his death in 1969 at age for[...]
"A fascinating literary and historical document, the most insightful look at the Beat Generation." --Dan Wakefield, author of "New York in the Fifties" and "Going All the Way"First published in 1978, "Jack's Book" gives us an intimate look into the life and times of the "King of the Beats." Through [...]
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 Washington State. Published just a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation [...]
"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[...]
"My best most serious sad and true book yet." --Jack Kerouac "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 workds becase they'd heard his astonishing revelations of heaven delivered in catechism on no more encou[...]
Presents the story of the self-destruction of a beautiful Aztec prostitute enmeshed in the drug underworld of Mexico City[...]
"Each book by Jack Kerouac is unique, a telepathic diamond. With prose set in the middle of his mind, he reveals consciousness itself in all its syntatic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion. Such rich natural writing is nonpareil in later half XX century, a s[...]
"When someone asks 'Where does Kerouac] get that stuff' say: 'From you ' He lay awake all night listening with eyes and ears. A night of a thousand years. Heard it in the womb, heard it in the cradle, heard it in school, heard it on the floor of life's stock exchange where dreams are traded for gol[...]
"What I'm beginning to discover now is something beyond the novel and beyond the arbitrary confines of the story. . . . I'm making myself seek to find the wild form, that can grow with my wild heart . . . because now I know MY HEART DOES GROW." --Jack Kerouac, in a letter to John Clellon Holmes Wri[...]
Originally subtitled "An Adventurous Education, 1935-1946," 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 T[...]
A counterculture classic records the escapades of members of the beat generation as they seek pleasure and meaning while traveling coast to coast. Reprint.[...]
Written during a critical period of his life, Some of the Dharma is a key volume for understanding Kerouac and the spiritual underpinnings of his work. While his future masterpiece, On the Road, languished on the desks of unresponsive editors, Kerouac turned to Buddhist practice, and in 1953 began [...]
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-t[...]
'It is the sum of myself, as far as the written word can go' - Kerouac on "The Town and the City". Kerouac's debut novel is a great coming of age story which can be read as the essential prelude to his later classics. Inspired by grief over his father's death and gripped by determination to write th[...]