Jack Kerouac

A timeless travelogue from the leading light of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac's Lonesome Traveller is a jubilant celebration of human discoveryAs he roams the US, Mexico, Morocco, Paris and London, Kerouac records, in prose of pure poetry, life on the road. 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; catching up with the beat nightlife in New York; burying himself in the snow-capped mountains of north-west America; meditating on a sunlit roof in Tangiers; or falling in love with Montmartre and the huge white basilica of Sacré-Coeur - Kerouac reveals both the endless diversity of human life and his own high-spirited philosophy of self-fulfilment.'Full of startling and beautiful things ... one sees, hears and feels' Sunday Times

'Kerouac's grittiest novel ... sensual and uninhibited' The New York Times Driven mad by three years of endless telegrams, phonecalls, mail, reporters and snoopers in the wake of his hugely successful novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac, 'King of the Beats', needs peace, quiet and sobriety: surrounded and outnumbered he has to 'get away to solitude again or die'. Amidst the wild beauty of the Californian landscape, Kerouac struggles to come to terms with his own myth and its malign impact upon his life. The result is a moving account of a man struggling with inner demons: blessed by great talent and cursed with an urge towards self-destruction - a path lined with double bourbons, Manhattans and scotch ...

Jack Kerouac's classic novel about friendship, the search for meaning, and the allure of natureA witty, moving philosophical novel, Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums is a journey of self-discovery through the lens of Zen Buddhist thought. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Ann Douglas. Following the explosive energy of On the Road, the book that put the Beat Genration on the literary map - and Jack Kerouac on the bestseller list - comes The Dharma Bums, in which Kerouac charts the spiritual quest of a group of friends in search of Dharma, or Truth. Ray Smith and his friend Japhy, along with Morley the yodeller, head off into the high Sierras to seek the lesson of solitude and experience the Zen way of life. But in wildly Bohemian San Francisco, with its poetry jam sessions, marathon drinking bouts and experiments in 'yabyum', they find the ascetic route distinctly hard to follow.

In On the Road and other iconic works, Jack Kerouac created a quintessentially American voice and a revolutionary prose style. This remarkable gathering of previously unpublished writings reveals as never before the extraordinary literary journey that led to his phenomenal success--a journey with deep roots in the language and culture of Kerouac's French Canadian childhood. Edited and published with unprecedented access to the Kerouac archives, The Unknown Kerouac presents two lost novels, The Night Is My Woman and Old Bull in the Bowery, which Kerouac wrote in French during the especially fruitful years of 1951 and 1952. Discovered among his papers in the mid-nineties, they have been translated into English for the first time by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, who incorporates Kerouac's own partial translations. Also included are two journals from the heart of this same crucial period. In Private Philologies, Riddles, and a Ten-Day Writing Log, Kerouac recounts a brief stay in Denver--where he works on an early version of On the Road, reads dime novels, and even rides in a rodeo--and shows him contemplating writers like Chaucer and Joyce and playing with riddles and etymologies. Journal 1951, begun during a stay in a Bronx VA hospital, charts, in ecstatic, moving, and self-revealing pages, the wave of insights and breakthroughs that led Kerouac to the most singular transformation of American prose style since Hemingway. This landmark volume is rounded out with the memoir Memory Babe, a poignant evocation of childhood play and reverie in a robust immigrant community, in which Kerouac uncannily retrieves and distills the subtlest sense impressions. And finally, in an interview with his longtime friend and fellow Beat John Clellon Holmes and in the late fragment Beat Spotlight Kerouac reflects on his meteoric career and unlooked for celebrity. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

"Old Angel Midnight is one of the great delights of the boundless improvisational world. Jack Kerouac's ear is peerless, manifesting structures otherwise impossible. A masterpiece of the mind freed to fly. Read it aloud, for yourself, 'for the sake of reading, and for the sake of the Tongue ... Let's hear the Sound of the Universe, son.'"-Clark Coolidge Old Angel Midnight is a treasure trove of Kerouac's experiments with automatic writing, a method he practiced constantly to sharpen his imaginative reflexes. Recorded in a series of notebooks between 1956-1959, what Kerouac called his "endless automatic writing piece" began while he shared a cabin with poet Gary Snyder. Kerouac tried to emulate Snyder's daily Buddhist meditation discipline, using the technique of "letting go" to free his mind for pure spontaneous writing, annotating the stream of words flowing through his consciousness in response to auditory stimuli and his own mental images. Kerouac continued his exercise in spontaneous composition over the next three years, including a period spent with William Burroughs in Tangiers. He made no revisions to the automatic writing entries in his notebooks, which were collected and transcribed for publication as originally written. Old Angel Midnight attests to the success of Kerouac's experiment and bears witness to his commitment to his craft, and to the pleasure he takes in writing: "I like the bliss of mind." "Old Angel Midnight is the illuminated notebook, the ur-text, of Kerouac vision/voice/language. The golden rule Catholicism of New England mind in kahoots with free time Godhead consciousness. This is true beat pleasure. This is our music."-Thurston Moore

In 1944- under circumstances that remain rather mysterious- an aspiring writer named Jack Kerouac lost a novella-length manuscript title The Haunted Life , a coming-of-age story set in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. Kerouac set his fictional treatment of Peter Martin against the backdrop of the everyday. Peter is heading into his sophomore year at Boston College, and while home for the summer in Galloway he struggles with the pressing issues of his day- the economic crisis of the previous decade and what appears to be the impending entrance of the United States into the Second World War. The Haunted Life is rounded out by sketches, notes, and reflections Kerouac kept during the novella's composition, as well as a revealing selection of correspondence with his father, Leo Kerouac.

For Jack Kerouac the heart of the haiku was ""the objective beautiful sad ungraspable world as it is."" Translated for the first time into Irish, Kerouac's poems are presented in a facing-page English- and Irish-language edition.

Beatklassikko Kerouacin vuonna 1966 ilmestyneessä myöhäiskauden romaanissa quebeciläistaustainen yksinäinen matkamies kulkee Ranskassa etsimässä juuriaan ja sitä kautta myös itseään. Jack Kerouacin oloinen päähenkilö Jack Duluoz kohtaa liikennevälineissä, kaduilla ja baareissa satunnaisia ranskalaisia elämänkohtaloineen. Quebeciläisyytensä vuoksi Duluoz kokee itsensä muukalaiseksi. Satori eli itsensä löytäminen ja valaistuminen toteutuu päähenkilölle sarjana monenlaisia pienimuotoisia löytöjä. Satorin saavuttaa, kun kykenee irtautumaan arkisista murheista ja hylkäämään valikoivan mielensä. Satori Pariisissa on teos, jossa Jack Kerouac tulee ikään kuin ohimennen kirjoittaneeksi käypää maailmankirjallisuutta ajatuksistaan ja tuntemuksistaan.

In the spring of 1943, 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 . Nearly seventy years later, its long-awaited publication provides fascinating details and insight into the early life and development of an American literary icon. A clear precursor to such landmark works as On the Road , The Dharma Bums , and Visions of Cody , it is an important formative work that hints at the hallmarks of classic Kerouac: the search for spiritual meaning in a materialistic world, spontaneous travel as the true road to freedom, late nights in bars engaged in intense conversation, the desperate urge to escape from society, and the strange, terrible beauty of loneliness.

Vejene er en milepæl i amerikansk litteratur. Bogen tager sin begyndelse, da Neal Cassady slutter sig til Jack Kerouac og Allen Ginsbergs kreds af litterære bohemer i New York. Cassady inspirerer dem til at rejse rundt i hele USA for at søge efter »en mistet arv, efter fædre, efter familien, efter et hjem, ja, efter selve Amerika«. Som sagt så gjort. Kerouacs bog kommer til at tegne et portræt af en generation af unge mennesker, der hverken kan eller vil indpasse sig i det etablerede amerikanske samfund anno 1947. Den er fuld af ungdommens livstørst og fandenivoldskhed og giver et medrivende litterært billede af et Amerika, der er ved at forvandles til blot en drøm. Denne udgave af Vejene er den legendariske første version af Kerouac’s selvbiografiske roman, som blev skrevet på en næsten 40 meter lang papirrulle. I modsætning til den senere version bruger det oprindelige manuskript hovedpersonernes autentiske navne frem for pseudonymer, og det rummer mere personligt stof, bl.a. om Kerouacs far. Det er en vildere og saftigere bog end den senere version. Vejene – det oprindelige manuskript udkommer her for første gang på dansk med forord af den danske digter Peter Laugesen.

Book of Dreams is a collection of dream journals by the renowned American author and poet, Jack Kerouac. The book features a compilation of his dreams from 1952 to 1960, which he recorded in a series of notebooks. Kerouac believed that dreams were a window into the subconscious mind, and he used them as inspiration for his writing. The book provides an intimate and revealing look into Kerouac's innermost thoughts and emotions. The dreams are often surreal and vivid, reflecting his preoccupations with spirituality, sexuality, and the search for meaning in life. The dreams are also infused with Kerouac's unique style of writing, which is characterized by stream-of-consciousness prose and spontaneous, poetic language. Book of Dreams is a valuable resource for anyone interested in Kerouac's life and work. It sheds light on his creative process and provides insight into the themes and motifs that appear in his writing. The book is also a fascinating exploration of the nature of dreams and their potential as a source of inspiration and self-discovery. This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

"In the "Book of Dreams "I just continue the same story but in the dreams I had of the real-life characters I always write about." Excerpt: WALKING THROUGH SLUM SUBURBS of Mexico City I'm stopped by smiling threesome of cats who've disengaged themselves from the general fairly crowded evening street of brown lights, coke stands, tortillas--Unmistakably going to steal my bag--I struggled a little, gave up--Begin communicating with them my distress and in fact do so well they end up just stealing parts of my stuff.... We walk off leaving the bag with someone--arm in arm like a gang to the downtown lights of Letran, across a field--Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was a principal actor in the Beat Generation, a companion of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady in that great adventure. His books include "On the Roa, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, Lonesome Traveler, Scattered Poems, Visions of Cody, Pomes All Sizes, " and "Scripture of the Golden Eternity."

A poignant masterpiece of wrenching personal expression from the author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums In this 1962 novel, Kerouac's alter ego Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of balance. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, Big Sur "reveals consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion."

Big Sur är den roman av Kerouac som går djupast ner i självavslöjandet av Kerouacs egen personlighet och av myten Kerouac och framförallt: av alkoholisten Kerouac. Det är en av världslitteraturens mest skakande och mest lysande spritskildringar, skriven av ett författargeni som befinner sig mitt i spritdemonens dödsomfamning, insnärjd i okontrollerbara paranoida ideer, riden av delirium tremens, kämpande för att behålla sitt förstånd, kämpande för att behålla sina bilder, sina minnen, sina tankar, sin själ, kämpande för sitt liv.