Poetry Books by Jack Kerouac
Publisher:
Published Date: 2015-03-17
Categories: Fiction
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 deeply moving meditation on Kerouac's older brother, who died at nine of rheumatic fever, and who for Kerouac became an emblem of saintliness. The intensely focused and harrowing Big Sur (1962) finds fictional alter ego Jack Duluoz returning to California to escape fame.
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published Date: 2019-07-04
Categories: Fiction
Kerouac's last published novel, Pic is an endearing portrait of a road trip across America, seen through the eyes of one innocent, adventurous boy. 'Pic', or Pictorial Review Jackson, is a ten-year-old boy from North Carolina. When his grandfather dies and he is sent to live with another relative, his older brother, Slim, comes to rescue him. Together they hitch to New York City and, eventually, all the way to California, encountering hardship, kindness, music, love and danger as they go.
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published Date: 2014-03-04
Categories: Fiction
The Haunted Life is the coming-of-age story of Peter Martin, a college track star determined to idle away what he knows will be one of his last innocent summers in his tranquil New England home town. But with the war escalating in Europe and his two closest friends both plotting their escapes, he realises how sheltered his upbringing has been. As he surveys the competing influences of his youth, he struggles to determine what might lead to an intellectually authentic life. The Haunted Life is ultimately a meditation on intellectual truth, male friendship and the desire for movement - all themes that would dominate Kerouac's later work.
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published Date: 2018-02-22
Categories: Travel
'See my hand up-tipped, learn the secret of my human heart...' Soaring, freewheeling snapshots of life on the road across America, from the Beat writer who inspired a generation. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published Date: 2012-03-01
Categories: Fiction
'A remarkable ear for the cadences of a phrase or sentence, a sense of how to register in words the sheer, sweet flow of things' Guardian This semi-autobiographical tale of Kerouac's own trip to France, to trace his ancestors and explore his own understanding of the Buddhism that came to define his beliefs, contains some of Kerouac's most lyrical descriptions. From his reports of the strangers he meets and the all-night conversations he enjoys in seedy bars in Paris and Brittany, to the moment in a cab he experiences Buddhism's satori - a feeling of sudden awakening - Kerouac's affecting and revolutionary writing transports the reader. Published at the height of his fame, Satori in Paris is a hectic tale of philosophy, identity and the powerful strangeness of travel.
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published Date: 2008-08-28
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Never before published in Kerouac's lifetime, this 1955 biography of the founder of Buddhism is a clear and powerful study of Siddartha Gautama's life and works. Wake Up recounts the story of Prince Siddhartha's royal upbringing and his father's wish to protect him from all human suffering, despite a prediction that he would become a great holy man in later life. Departing from his father's palace, Siddhartha adopts a homeless life, struggles with his meditations, and eventually finds Enlightenment. Written at the end of Kerouac's career, when he became increasingly interested in Buddhist teachings, and collected for the first time in one book, this fresh and accessible biography is both an important addition to Kerouac's work and a valuable introduction to the world of Buddhism itself.
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published Date: 2011-07-21
Categories: Fiction
As he roams the US, Mexico, Morocco, Paris and London, Kerouac records life on the road in prose of pure poetry. 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; meditating on a sunlit roof in Tangiers or falling in love with Montmartre - Kerouac reveals both the endless diversity of human life and his own particular philosophy of self-fulfillment.
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published Date: 2011-07-21
Categories: Fiction
'The tender and achingly poetic account of a love affair' Lester Bangs, Rolling Stone Leo Percepied, aspiring writer and self-styled freewheeling bum, gravitates to the subterraneans, impoverished intellectuals who haunt the bars of San Francisco. One of them is Mardou Fox, beautiful and a little crazy, whose dark eyes, full of suffering and sweetness, find recognition in Leo. But, afraid of his growing involvement, Leo sets out to destroy their love. Written in three days, The Subterraneans is, like all Kerouac's work, closely related to his own life while encapsulating his great vision of America.
Publisher:
Published Date: 2007
Categories: Literary Collections
A 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."
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published Date: 2019-07-04
Categories: Poetry
'I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday' Freewheeling and spontaneous, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac's most significant and emblematic poem. Consisting of 242 loosely linked 'choruses', it takes in life, death, spirituality, jazz improvisation, memory, fantasies and dreams, all infused with the rhythm of the blues, to create a surreal and all-encompassing epic. 'A spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature' Allen Ginsberg 'A jazz poet. His sentences frequently move into tempestuous sweeps and whorls and sometimes they have something of the rich music of Gerard Manley Hopkins or Dylan Thomas' The New York Herald Tribune
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published Date: 2007
Categories: Fiction
CHARTERS/PORTABLE JACK KEROUAC (BC)
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published Date: 2013-03-26
Categories: Fiction
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.
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published Date: 2019-07-04
Categories: Fiction
'She understands Karma, she says: "What I do, I reap"' Her name means sadness, yet Tristessa, a prostitute and morphine addict, lives without cares in her shabby room with a menagerie of pets and an altar to the Virgin Mary. Based on Jack Kerouac's own real-life love affair in Mexico city, this is the story of a man's ill-fated relationship with a woman he portrays with tenderness and dignity, even as her life spirals out of control. 'A narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a chihuaha dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junky lady, first in their crowded bedroom, then out to drunken streets, taco stands, and pads at dawn in Mexico City slums' Allen Ginsberg
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published Date: 2011-07-21
Categories: Fiction
THE DHARMA BUMS appeared just one year after the author's explosive ON THE ROAD had put the Beat Generation on the literary map and Kerouac on the best-seller list. The same expansiveness, humour and contagious zest for life that sparked the earlier novels sparks this one too, but through a more cohesive story. The books follow two young men engaged in a passionate search for dharma or truth. Their major adventure is the pursuit of the Zen way, which takes them climbing into the high sierras to seek the lesson of solitude. With an Introduction by Kerouac expert, Ann Douglas.
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Published Date: 2006
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Excerpts and passages from the personal diaries of the great Beat writer chronicle a pivotal era in Kerouac's life, describing the creation of his first novel, The Town and City; his special friendships with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady; and his own take on the events described in On the Road. Reprint.
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published Date: 2020-07-02
Categories: Fiction
'The piteousness of his little soft shroud of hair falling down his brow and swept aside by the hand over blue serious eyes' Described by Kerouac as 'my most serious sad and true book', Visions of Gerard forms the first volume of his memoir cycle the 'Duluoz Legend'. Based on Jack Kerouac's memories of the beloved older brother who died when he was a boy, it is unique among his novels for its dreamlike evocation of the sensations of childhood - its wisdom, anguish, intensity, innocence, joy and pain. It is a haunting exploration of the precariousness of existence. 'Called a "pain-tale" by Kerouac, it's the story of an almost divine, Buddha-like child wracked with sickness and suffering' Guardian
Publisher: Viking Adult
Published Date: 1999
Categories: Literary Collections
Letters provide a portrait of Kerouac during his final twelve years of life, from his rise to fame to his death in 1969 at age forty-seven
Publisher: City Lights Books
Published Date: 1994-05
Categories: Literary Criticism
These classic Kerouac meditations, zen koans, and prose poems express the poet's beatific quest for peace and joy through oneness with the universe.
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published Date: 2012-05-03
Categories: Fiction
Jack Kerouac called Doctor Sax, the enigmatic figure who haunted his boyhood imagination, 'my ghost, personal angel, private shadow, secret lover'. In this extraordinary autobiographical account of growing up in Lowell, Massachussetts, told through his fictional alter ego Jack Duluoz, he mingles real people and events with fantastical figures to capture the accents, scents, sights and texture of his childhood: playing among the river weeds and railroad tracks, going to church, witnessing life and death on the street corners. Written when he was staying with William Burroughs in Mexico in 1952, Doctor Sax was Kerouac's favourite of all his books: a dark, vivid and magical evocation of a boy's vibrant inner life.
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published Date: 2011-07-21
Categories: Fiction
'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 the Great American Novel, he draws largely on his own New England childhood.
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published Date: 1978
Categories: Fiction
Set in the New England town, a family including three daughters and five sons, each endowed with an energy and vision of life, drives the narrative from the early part of the century to the years following World War II.
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published Date: 2012-05-03
Categories: Fiction
Desolation Angels is the wild and soulful story of the legendary road trip that Jack Kerouac took before the publication of On the Road, told through the persona of Jack Duluoz and accompanied by his thinly-disguised Beat cohorts Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs. As they hitch, hop freight trains, walk and talk their way across the world, from California to Mexico, London to Paris and on to opium-ridden Tangiers, Kerouac chronicles their poetry, partying, mountain vigils and spiritual contemplation with unsurpassable energy and humanity.
Publisher: City Lights Books
Published Date: 2001-06
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
A record of the writer's actual dreams is populated by characters from his novels.
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Published Date: 2004-01
Categories: Juvenile Nonfiction
- Presents the most important 20th century criticism on major works from The Odyssey through modern literature - The critical essays reflect a variety of schools of criticism - Contains critical biographies, notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author's life, and an index - Introductory essay by Harold Bloom"
