Jack Kerouac
1) On the road
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
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
2) Big Sur
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"Five years after On the Road, the book that made him an overnight celebrity, Kerouac examines with wrenching clarity his unwished for fame, escalating alcoholism, and troubling alienation from nature. In a thinly veiled autobiographical account of his time in Big Sur at the cabin of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and with friends in San Francisco--among them fellow iconoclasts Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder, and Alan Watts--he chronicles a ruinous alcoholic bender...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Presents the previously unpublished original scroll edition of Jack Kerouac's novel "On the Road" which Kerouac wrote over a three-week period in 1951 on eight sheets of tracing paper that he taped together to form a 120-foot scroll. Includes the real names of the friends that inspired the book's storyline.
Author
Publisher
Penguin Publishing Group
Pub. Date
2008
Language
English
Formats
Description
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...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
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...
Author
Publisher
Da Capo Press
Pub. Date
2012
Language
English
Description
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
...Author
Language
English
Description
Poetic meditations on joy, consciousness, and becoming one with the infinite universe from the author of On the Road During an unexplained fainting spell, Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac experienced a flash of enlightenment. A student of Buddhist philosophy, Kerouac recognized the experience as "satori," a moment of life-changing epiphany. The knowledge he gained in that instant is expressed in this volume of sixty-six prose poems with language...
Author
Language
English
Description
Beat Generation great Jack Kerouac traverses the vast landscape of American counterculture in this raucous and insightful collection In these collected articles, essays, and wild autobiographical tales, Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, leads readers down the highways and through the myriad subcultures of mid-twentieth-century America, guiding them along with his ingenious observations and brilliant command of language. He cruises to San Francisco...
9) Tristessa
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
In 1955 novelist Jack Kerouac detoured from his cross-country American travels to Mexico City where a group of junkie expatriates he had known from the New York City post-War scene had gone for the cheap and plentiful supply of heroin and morphine. Fellow Beat writer William S. Burroughs, who had been a part of the Mexican expatriate community, had introduced Kerouac to Bill Garver (named Old Bull Gaines in the novel), a much-older long-term addict...
Author
Language
English
Description
In his first frankly autobiographical work, Jack Kerouac tells the exhilarating story of the years when he was writing the books that captivated and infuriated the public, restless years of wandering during which he worked as a railway brakeman in California, a steward on a tramp steamer, and a fire lookout on the crest of Desolation Peak in the Cascade Mountains.
Author
Language
English
Description
Truth and Beautiful Meaningful Lies is a collection of memorable quotes from one of the most quoted writers in American literature.
One of the most celebrated writers in American literature, Jack Kerouac helped an entire generation of post-WWII Americans explore a purpose beyond the standard narrative values, spiritual ideologies, and economic materialism that was rampant throughout pre-war America. Alongside prominent beat writers like Allen Ginsberg...
12) Scattered Poems
Author
Language
English
Description
Just as he upended the conventions of the novel with On the Road, Jack Kerouac revolutionized American poetry in this ingenious collection Bringing together selections from literary journals and his private notebooks, Jack Kerouac's Scattered Poems exemplifies the Beat Generation icon's innovative approach to language. Kerouac's poems, populated by hitchhikers, Chinese grocers, Buddhist saints, and cultural figures from Rimbaud to Harpo Marx, evoke...
13) Dr. Sax
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
In this haunting novel of intensely felt adolescence, Jack Kerouac tells the story of Jack Duluoz, a French-Canadian boy growing up, as Kerouac himself did, in the dingy factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts. Dr. Sax, with his flowing cape, slouch hat, and insinuating leer, is chief among the many ghosts and demons that populate Jack's fantasy world. Deftly mingling memory and dream, Kerouac captures the accents and texture of his boyhood in Lowell...
14) Satori in Paris
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
From the renowned Beat writer, Kerouac's colorful and meandering search
for his family history, now reissued following his centenary celebrationSatori in Paris is the semi-autobiographical tale of Jack Kerouac's trip to France in search of his heritage. Beginning in Paris and moving west to Brittany, Kerouac traces the paths of his ancestors and explores his own understanding of the Buddhism that came to define his beliefs. From his familiar milieu...
Author
Language
English
Description
Kerouac's most important poem, Mexico City Blues, incorporates all the elements of his theory of spontaneous composition. Memories, fantasies, dreams, and surrealistic free association are all lyrically combined in the loose format of the blues to create an original and moving epic. "I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday. I take 242 choruses; my ideas vary and sometimes roll from chorus to chorus...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
A quintessential American family is pulled apart by war and the rapidly changing tides of society in Jack Kerouac's captivating first novel Published seven years before his iconic On the Road, Jack Kerouac's debut novel follows the experiences of one family as they navigate the seismic cultural shifts following World War II. Inspired by Kerouac's own New England youth, the eight Martin children enjoy an idyllic upbringing in a small Massachusetts...
Author
Language
English
Description
From the iconic New York Times–bestselling author of On the Road: Three revolutionary collections of poetry in one volume. Rebelling against the dry rules and literary pretentiousness he perceived in early twentieth-century poetry, Jack Kerouac pioneered a poetic style informed by oral tradition and driven by concrete language with neither embellishment nor abstraction. In these three groundbreaking collections, the legendary Beat writer offers...
18) Book of Dreams
Author
Language
English
Description
Book of Dreams is an experimental novel published by Jack Kerouac in 1960, culled from the dream journal he kept from 1952 to 1960. In it Kerouac tries to continue plot-lines with characters from his books as he sees them in his dreams. This book is stylistically wild, spontaneous, and flowing, like much of Kerouac's writing, and helps to give insight into the Beat Generation author's mind.
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Satori in Paris and Pic, two of Jack Kerouac's last novels, showcase the remarkable range and versatility of his mature talent. Satori in Paris is a rollicking autobiographical account of Kerouac's search for his heritage in France, and lands the author in his familiar milieu of seedy bars and all-night conversations. Pic is Kerouac's final novel and one of his most unusual. Narrated by ten-year-old Pictorial Review Jackson in a North Carolina vernacular,...
20) Maggie Cassidy
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
In Jack Kerouac's teenage years his friends gave him a nickname that was prescient and stuck with him throughout his life-Memory Babe. Kerouac was able to conjure up scenes from his childhood and adolescence that astounded his friends with their precision and detail. This talent was to serve him well as a novelist, enabling him to recall long segments of conversation that he could instantly pound out on his typewriter. Maggie Cassidy is one of Kerouac's...