Jack Kerouac

Follows the counterculture escapades of members of the Beat generation as they seek pleasure and meaning while traveling coast to coast. As he travels across 1950s America, aspiring writer Sal Paradise chronicles his escapades with the charismatic Dean Moriarty. Sal admires Dean's passion for experiencing as much as possible of life and his wild flights of poetic fancy

In the spring of 1943, during a stint in the Merchant Marine, twenty-one-year old Jack Kerouac set out to write his first novel. Working diligently day and night to complete it by hand, he titled it The Sea Is My Brother. Now, nearly seventy years later, its long-awaited publication provides fascinating details and insight into the early life and development of an American literary icon.

Written seven years before The Town and The City

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Though raised Catholic, in the early 1950s Jack Kerouac became fascinated with Buddhism, an interest that would have a profound impact on his ideas of spirituality and their expression in his writing from Mexico City Blues to The Dharma Bums. Published for the first time in book form, Wake Up is Kerouac’s retelling of the story of Prince Siddhartha Gautama, who as a young man abandoned his wealthy family and comfortable...

Written over the course of three days and three nights, The Subterraneans was generated out of the same kind of ecstatic flash of inspiration that produced another one of Kerouac's early classics, On The Road. Centering around the tempestuous breakup of Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox-two denizens of the 1950s San Francisco underground-The Subterraneans is a tale of dark alleys and smoky rooms, of artists, visionaries, and adventurers existing outside...

Part of "The Duluoz Legend, a multivolume autobiographical saga recording the major events of the author's life"--Page 761.

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...

"On a blind date in Greenwich Village set up by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac met Joyce Glassman. This unique book, containing the many letters the two of them wrote to each other whenever Jack was in transit, reveals a surprising side of Kerouac - his capacity for forming a tender bond with a woman who shared his passion for writing. It also gives us a vivid and immediate picture from the female perspective of what it took to be young and Beat in...