Jack Kerouac

FROM THE PUBLISHER : On the Road chronicles Jack Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassidy, "a side burned 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 compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz combine to make On the Road an inspirational work of lasting importance. Kerouac's...

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. Published for the first time in book form, this is Kerouac's retelling of the story of Prince Siddhartha Gautama, who as a young man abandoned his wealthy family and comfortable home for a lifelong search for enlightenment. As a compendium of the teachings...

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...

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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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...

1944 was a troubled and momentous year for Jack Kerouac. In March, his close friend and literary confidant, Sebastian Sampas, lost his life on the Anzio beachhead while serving as a US Army medic. That spring-still reeling with grief over Sebastian-Kerouac solidified his friendships with Lucien Carr, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, offsetting the loss of Sampas by immersing himself in New York's blossoming mid-century bohemia. That August,...

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...

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.

Jack Kerouac's Maggie Cassidy is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel that offers a tender and nostalgic look at first love and adolescence. Set in the 1930s in a small Massachusetts town, the novel follows Jack Duluoz (Kerouac's alter ego) as he experiences the highs and lows of his teenage years, including his passionate yet fragile romance with Maggie Cassidy, a local girl. With its lyrical prose, vivid descriptions, and emotional depth,...

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,...