Books by Jack Kerouac

Book of Blues

by Jack Kerouac

Best known for his "Legend of Duluoz" novels, including On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In these eight extended poems, Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues form that he used to fullest effect in Mexico City Blues, his largely unheralded classic of postmodern literature. Edited by Kerouac himself, Book of Blues is an exuberant foray into language and consciousness, rich with imagery, propelled by rythm, and based in a reverent attentiveness to the moment.
"In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to the other, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musicians spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of time as it waves & waves on by in measured choruses." —Jack Kerouac

Big Sur

by Jack Kerouac

A poignant masterpiece of wrenching personal expression from the acclaimed author of On the Road

“In many ways, particularly in the lyrical immediacy that is his distinctive glory, this is Kerouac’s best book . . . certainly he has never displayed more ‘gentle sweetness.’”—San Francisco Chronicle

Jack 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.”

The Dharma Bums

by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac’s classic novel about friendship, the search for meaning, and the allure of nature

“In [On the Road] Kerouac’s heroes were sensation seekers; now they are seekers after truth . . . the novel often attains a beautiful dignity.”—Chicago Tribune

First published in 1958, a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouac’s most powerful and influential novels. The story focuses on two ebullient young Americans—mountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder, and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writer—whose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Francisco’s Bohemia to solitude and mountain climbing in the High Sierras.

On the Road (Penguin Classics)

by Jack Kerouac

The classic novel of freedom and the search for authenticity that defined a generation

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

On the Road chronicles Jack Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassady, "a sideburned 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 classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be “Beat” and has inspired every generation since its initial publication more than fifty years ago. This Penguin Classics edition contains an introduction by Ann Charters.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

by Jack Kerouac

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. 25,000 first printing.

Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

by Jack Kerouac

Selections from Jack Kerouac’s journals of the late 1940s and early 1950s – the raw material for what became his classic novel On the Road

September 5, 2017, marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of On the Road

Jack Kerouac is best known through the image he put forth in his autobiographical novels. Yet it is only his private journals, in which he set down the raw material of his life and thinking, that reveal to us the real Kerouac. In Windblown World, distinguished Americanist Douglas Brinkley has gathered a selection of journal entries from the most pivotal period of Kerouac’s life, 1947 to 1954. Here is Kerouac as a hungry young writer finishing his first novel while forging crucial friendships with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Truly a self-portrait of the artist as a young man, this unique and indispensable volume is sure to become an integral element of the Beat oeuvre.

Book of Sketches (Penguin Poets)

by Jack Kerouac

In 1952 and 1953 as he wandered around America, Jack Kerouac jotted down spontaneous prose poems, or "sketches" as he called them, on small notebooks that he kept in his shirt pockets. The poems recount his travels—New York, North Carolina, Lowell (Massachusetts, Kerouac’s birthplace), San Francisco, Denver, Kansas, Mexico—observations, and meditations on art and life. The poems are often strung together so that over the course of several of them, a little story—or travelogue—appears, complete in itself. Published for the first time, Book of Sketches offers a luminous, intimate, and transcendental glimpse of one of the most original voices of the twentieth century at a key time in his literary and spiritual development.

Lonesome Traveler

by Jack Kerouac

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 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. Resembling his novels in its exuberant style and “jazzy impressionistic prose” (The New Yorker), Lonesome Traveler gives us “Kerouac’s nerve ends vs. the universe, with flashes of poetry, truth, and daffiness’ (The New York Times Book Review).

Lonesome Traveler

by Jack Kerouac

From the acclaimed Beat writer, Jack Kerouac's unique collection of personal travel writing, now reissued following his centenary celebration

In his first directly autobiographical book, Jack Kerouac relates the exhilarating stories of the years he spent restlessly traveling and writing his acclaimed novels. He journeys from the California deserts crisscrossed by train tracks to the bullfights of Mexico to the Beat nightlife of New York City, and across the Atlantic to Paris, Morocco, and London. With echoes of landscapes that appear in his other novels, including The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels, and featuring his distinctive exuberant style and "jazzy impressionistic prose" (New Yorker), Lonesome Traveler is a unique addition to Kerouac's body of work.

The Subterraneans

by Jack Kerouac

From the most famous of the Beat writers and the author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s intoxicating love story of two young bohemians
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 romance and 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 mainstream America’s field of vision. Loosely based on Kerouac’s own life, and peopled with analogues of real-life friends, including William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady, The Subterraneans is a vivid and breathless masterwork of Beat literature.

Scattered Poems (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)

by Jack Kerouac

Spontaneous poetry by the author of On the Road, gathered from underground and ephemeral publications; including “San Francisco Blues,&; the variant texts of “Pull My Daisy&; and "American haiku."
HERE DOWN ON DARK EARTH
before we all go to Heaven
VISIONS OF AMERICA
All that hitchhikin
All that railroadin
All that comin back
to America —Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was a principal actor in the Beat Generation, and a companion of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady in that great adventure. His books include On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Cody, Pomes All Sizes (City Lights) and Scripture of the Golden Eternity (City Lights).

Pomes All Sizes

by Jack Kerouac

The original manuscript of this book, written between 1954 and 1965, has been in the safekeeping of City Lights all the years since Kerouac’s death in 1969. Reaching beyond the scope of his Mexico City Blues, here are pomes about Mexico and Tangier, Berkeley and the Bowery. Mid-fifties road poems, hymns and songs of God, drug poems, wine poems, dharma poems and Buddhist meditations. Poems to Beat friends, goofball poems, quirky haiku, and a fine, long elegy in “Canuckian Child Patoi Probably Medieval . . . an English blues.” But more than a quarter of a century after it was written, Pomes of All Sizes today would seem to be more than a sum of it parts, revealing a questing Kerouac grown beyond the popular image of himself as a Beat on the Road.
"Here is a treasure, in the mainstream of American Literature . . . lovely familiar classic Kerouacism's, nostalgic gathas from 1955 Berkeley cottage days, pure sober tender Kerouac of your yore, pithy exquisite later drunken laments and bitter nuts and verses . . . to be appreciated by cognoscenti and literate strangers alike . . . ." —from the Introduction by Allen Ginsberg
"Underlying this volume . . . is the drama of Kerouac the mystic, with his urge toward control, at odds with Kerouac the freewheeling Beat and, on a personal level, Kerouac the alcoholic. Yet as Ginsberg observes in his introduction, division–the sense of life as "both real and dream"–is the pervasive "spiritual intelligence" of the Beats. Given that, this is a perhaps ironically representative volume." —Publishers Weekly
"Here in Pomes All Sizes you discover the contemplative Kerouac, musing on the quiet meaning of things or thinking of friends in other places, casting his thoughts into "little short lines" and stopping exactly where the first thought stopped. There is delight to be gained here, poetic delight and a fuller picture of the great Kerouac persona which has relentlessly been reduced over the years to the well-known caricature of the graceless drunken beatnik lout. Bullshit! Kerouac, my friends, was full of grace, and a 'great creator of forms that ultimately find expression in mores and what have you.'" —John Sinclair
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was a principal actor in the Beat Generation, and a companion of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady in that great adventure. His books include On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Cody, Scattered Poems (City Lights), and Scripture of the Golden Eternity (City Lights).

Departed Angels: The Lost Paintings

by Jack Kerouac, Ed Adler

This first-ever collection of Jack Kerouac's visual art includes nearly every existing full-color painting collected and preserved by the Kerouac estate in Lowell, Massachusetts. Also included are dozens of black-and-white line drawings, sketches, and facsimile reproductions of Kerouac's notations from his unpublished notebooks. In writing, Kerouac's restless and relentless experimentation—what he called "spontaneous bop prosody"—pushed language to the boundaries of meaning. In painting and drawing he found a complementary means of expression. A friend and admirer of painters Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, Franz Kline, and Dody Muller, Kerouac was an ardent and deliberate student who worked to develop and refine his skills and his conception of the act of painting—a conception related to the spontaneous composition he had pioneered in his books. Ed Adler's essay offers an unprecedented view of Kerouac, the visual artist. Rich in anecdote and drawing on extensive quotation from Kerouac's letters, notebooks, and published writings, Adler's essay demonstrates the biographical and thematic preoccupations common to Kerouac's writing and painting, especially Kerouac's struggle to integrate the two spiritual traditions, Catholicism and Buddhism, to which he was devoted. No consideration of Kerouac will be complete without reference to this heretofor- unseen aspect of his life and work.

Desolation Angels

by Jack Kerouac

The classic autobiographical novel, “one of the most true, comic, and grizzly journeys in American literature” (Time), from acclaimed author Jack Kerouac

“If the Pulitzer Prize were given for the book that is most representative of American life, I would nominate Desolation Angels.”—Dan Wakefield, The Atlantic

Desolation Angels covers a key year in Jack Kerouac’s life—the period that led up to the publication of On the Road in September of 1957. After spending two months in the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington, Kerouac’s fictional self Jack Duluoz comes down from the isolated mountains to the wild excitement of the bars, jazz clubs, and parties of San Francisco, before traveling on to Mexico City, New York, Tangiers, Paris, and London. Duluoz attempts to extricate himself from the world but fails, for one must “live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.” Desolation Angels is quintessential Kerouac.

Beat Generation

by Jack Kerouac

Beat Generation is a play about tension, about friendship, and about karma—what it is and how you get it. It begins one fine morning with a few friends, honest laborers some of them, some close to being down-and-out, passing around a bottle of wine. It ends with a kind of satori-like reaffirmation of the power of friendship, of doing good through not doing, and the intrinsic worth of the throwaway little exchanges that make up our lives.

Written in 1957, the same year that On the Road was first published, and set in 1953, Beat Generation portrays an authentic and alternate 1950s America. Kerouac's characters are working-class men and women—a step away from vagrants, but not a big step. Their dialogue positively sings, suggesting jazz riffs in their rhythm and content, and Kerouac, like a master composer, arranges it to magical effect. Here is the heart and soul of the beat mentality, the zeitgeist that blossomed over the decades and eventually culminated in the counter-culture of 1960s America. It's a spirit that still lives.

Orpheus Emerged

by Jack Kerouac

"Rebellion, self-destructive behavior, alcoholism--all the Kerouac hallmarks are in evidence..."--Publishers Weekly "A striking success."--Philadelphia Inquirer "There will never be a moment like this one," says poet and fellow Beat writer Robert Creeley, in his introduction to this literary event: the first full-length work to be published since Kerouac's death in 1969. Discovered by his estate, ORPHEUS EMERGED chronicles the passions, conflicts and dreams of a group of bohemians searching for truth while studying at a university. Kerouac wrote the story shortly after meeting Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and others in and around Columbia University who would form the core of the Beats. ORPHEUS EMERGED is a unique portrait of an artist as a young man and shows a writer in the process of finding the voice that would eventually express the spirit of a generation.

On the Road

by Jack Kerouac

The legendary novel of freedom and the search for authenticity that defined a generation, now in a striking new Pengiun Classics Deluxe Edition

Inspired by Jack Kerouac's adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naiveté and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.

On the Road

by Jack Kerouac

The classic novel of freedom and the search for authenticity that defined a generation—made into a 2012 film by Walter Salles, director of The Motorcycle Diaries
September 5th, 2017 marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of On the Road

Inspired by Jack Kerouac's adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naiveté and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up. The movie adaptation featured a cast of some of Hollywood's biggest stars, including Kristen Stewart (The Twilight Saga), Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams (Julie & Julia, The Fighter), Tom Sturridge, and Viggo Mortensen (the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Road).

The Portable Jack Kerouac (Portable Library)

by Jack Kerouac

Presents selections from Jack Kerouac's novels, poetry, letters, and essays.

Maggie Cassidy

by Jack Kerouac

From the bard of the Beat Generation comes a profoundly moving, autobiographical novel of childhood and first love.

“A surprisingly simple and appealing tale of a young student’s fumbling search for love among the high school set . . . at his best, [Kerouac] can give you poetic visions of the commonplace.”—The New York Times Book Review

“She’d cradle my broken head in her all-healing lap that beat like a heart; my eyes hot would feel the soothe fingertips of cool, the joy, the stroke and barely-touch, the feminine sweet loss bemused inward-biting far-thinking deep earth river-mad April caress . . .”

This touching novel of adolescent love and loss in a 1930s New England mill town is one of Kerouac’s most poignant works. It tells the story of teenager Jack Duluoz, exploring his secret passions, his sporting prowess, and his first romance, with a beautiful Irish girl named Maggie Cassidy.

Originally written in 1953, Maggie Cassidy is a remarkable, bittersweet evocation of the awkwardness and joy of growing up in America.

Visions of Cody

by Jack Kerouac

“To read On the Road but not Visions of Cody is to take a nice sightseeing tour but to forgo the spectacular rapids of Jack Kerouac’s wildest writings.”—The New York Times Book Review

“The centerpiece of all [Kerouac’s] novels.”—The Washington Post

Originally written in 1951–1952, Visions of Cody was an underground classic by the time it was finally published in 1972, three years after Kerouac’s death. Utilizing a radical, experimental form (“the New Journalism fifteen years early,” as Dennis McNally noted in Desolate Angel), Kerouac examines his own New York life in a collection of colorful stream-of-consciousness essays. Always transfixed by Neal Cassady—here named Cody Pomeray—along with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Kerouac also explores the feelings he had for a man who inspired much of his work.

Transcribing taped conversations between members of their group as they took drugs and drank, Visions of Cody reveals an intimate portrait of people caught up in destructive relationships with substances, and one another, capturing the members of the Beat Generation in the years before any label had been affixed to them.

Tristessa

by Jack Kerouac

Based on Jack Kerouac’s real-life love affair in Mexico City, this novel follows a man’s doomed relationship with a woman as her life spirals out of control.

“[Kerouac] loves language, and he obviously has a profound feeling for the human race. . . . In the end he is more truthful, entertaining, and honest than most writers on the American scene.”—The New York Times Book Review

This short novel, which Jack Kerouac wrote in the mid-1950s, tells of an American man’s ill-fated romance with an exotic, happy-go-lucky Mexican prostitute and morphine addict. Tristessa, who is Indian, and a deeply religious Catholic, lives in a room in a Mexico City slum with another addict and a menagerie of pets. After meeting her, the narrator leaves town for a year to travel in America, and upon his return he finds Tristessa beginning to fall apart at the seams.

This elegiac novel is both a haunting evocation of a spectral Mexico City and a moving meditation on a young woman’s pain and suffering.

Tristessa

by Jack Kerouac

Tristessa is a strange fever-dream of morphine sickness and belly-deep sadness. Or, in the words of Allen Ginsberg- 'a narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a chihuahua 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'.

Visions of Gerard: A Novel

by Jack Kerouac

“[A] pleasant and underrated surprise . . . [Visions of Gerard] has a winning simplicity and sweetness.” —The Washington Post

The first book in Kerouac's Duluoz Legend, a novella detailing the writer's early life as refracted through the prism of the untimely loss of his brother

Unique among Jack Kerouac's novels, Visions of Gerard captures the scenes and sensations of earliest childhood, the first four years in the life of Ti Jean Duluoz as they unfold in the short, tragic-happy life of his brother, Gerard. Set in Kerouac's hometown of Lovell, Massachusetts, childhood's intensity, innocence, suffering, and delight unfold as Gerard interacts with animals, has visions of Our Lady in heaven, astonishes the priest in the church confessional, and observes his family as they laugh and drink and weep—that is, when he isn't sick and confined to bed.

A novel that Kerouac called "my best most serious sad and true book yet," Visions of Gerard is a beautiful, unsettling, and melancholic exploration of the meaning and precariousness of existence.

Kerouac: Selected Letters: Volume 2: 1957-1969

by Jack Kerouac

An illuminating glimpse into the life and art of Beat legend Jack Kerouac through a collection of letters that “reveals the boldness and originality of Kerouac’s artistic vision” (The Boston Globe).

“It remains clear from his later letters that Kerouac understood what he was doing as a writer. He consistently explains his aesthetic, his plan to create the Duluoz Legend of books, and the essentially benign charity of his vision.”—San Francisco Chronicle

The first volume of Jack Kerouac’s selected letters was hailed as an important and revealing addition to Kerouac scholarship. This second and final volume, comprising letters written between 1957, the year On the Road was published, and the day before his death in 1969 at age forty-seven, tells Kerouac’s life story through his canid correspondences with friends, confidants, and editors—among them Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Philip Whalen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joyce Johnson, and Malcolm Cowley. Documenting his continuing development as a writer and his travels, love affairs, and complicated family life, the letters also reveal Kerouac’s amazing courage in the face of criticism and his never-ending quest to be the best writer possible.

Kerouac: Selected Letters 1957-1969 offers unparalleled insight into the life and mind of this giant of the American landscape.

Book of Haikus (Penguin Poets)

by Jack Kerouac

A compact collection of more than 500 poems from Jack Kerouac that reveal a lesser known but important side of his literary legacy

“Above all, a haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi pastorella.”—Jack Kerouac

Renowned for his groundbreaking Beat Generation novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac was also a master of the haiku, the three-line, seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form. Following the tradition of Basho, Buson, Shiki, Issa, and other poets, Kerouac experimented with this centuries-old genre, taking it beyond strict syllable counts into what he believed was the form’s essence. He incorporated his “American” haiku in novels and in his correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings.

In Book of Haikus, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich has supplemented a core haiku manuscript from Kerouac’s archives with a generous selection of the rest of his haiku, from both published and unpublished sources.

The Town and the City

by Jack Kerouac

“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.
Kerouac draws on his New England mill-town boyhood to create the world of George and Marguerite Martin and their eight children, each endowed with an energy and a vision of life. The Town and the City is vividly drawn with poetic prose, lacking the stream-of-consciousness style of his later works. Fans of Kerouac as well as Steinbeck, will be enthralled by this dramatic family saga capped by a final scene that poignantly sets up On the Road.

On the Road: (Penguin Orange Collection)

by Jack Kerouac

Part of the Penguin Orange Collection, a limited-run series of twelve influential and beloved American classics in a bold series design offering a modern take on the iconic Penguin paperback

Winner of the 2016 AIGA + Design Observer 50 Books | 50 Covers competition

For the seventieth anniversary of Penguin Classics, the Penguin Orange Collection celebrates the heritage of Penguin’s iconic book design with twelve influential American literary classics representing the breadth and diversity of the Penguin Classics library. These collectible editions are dressed in the iconic orange and white tri-band cover design, first created in 1935, while french flaps, high-quality paper, and striking cover illustrations provide the cutting-edge design treatment that is the signature of Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions today.

On the Road

Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece of the Beat era was first published in 1957 and continues to provide a vital portrait of a generation adrift, as well as inspiration for travelers, dreamers, and artists in every generation that has followed.

Big Sur: (Penguin Ink)

by Jack Kerouac

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."

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg

"[An] essential Beat masterpiece." --The Village Voice.

Perhaps one of the last great dual correspondences of the twentieth century, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters reveals not only the process of creation of the two most celebrated members of the Beat Generation, but also the unfolding of a remarkable friendship of immense pathos and spiritual depth. Through this exhilarating exchange of letters, two-thirds of which have never been published before, Kerouac and Ginsberg emerge first and foremost as writers of artistic passion, innovation, and genius. Vivid and enthralling, the letters, which date from their first meeting in 1944 to Kerouac's untimely death in 1969, chronicle the endless struggle, anguish, and sacrifice involved in giving form to their literary visions.

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg

The first collection of letters between the two leading figures of the Beat movement

Writers and cultural icons Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg are the most celebrated names of the Beat Generation, linked together not only by their shared artistic sensibility but also by a deep and abiding friendship, one that colored their lives and greatly influenced their writing. Editors Bill Morgan and David Stanford shed new light on this intimate and influential friendship in this fascinating exchange of letters between Kerouac and Ginsberg, two thirds of which have never been published before. Commencing in 1944 while Ginsberg was a student at Columbia University and continuing until shortly before Kerouac's death in 1969, the two hundred letters included in this book provide astonishing insight into their lives and their writing. While not always in agreement, Ginsberg and Kerouac inspired each other spiritually and creatively, and their letters became a vital workshop for their art. Vivid, engaging, and enthralling, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters provides an unparalleled portrait of the two men who led the cultural and artistic movement that defined their generation.

The Portable Jack Kerouac (Penguin Classics)

by Jack Kerouac

This definitive Kerouac collection—the only anthology of his work ever published—is an essential introduction to one of the country’s most influential writers.

“Kerouac’s work represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation.”—The New York Times Book Review

This one-volume omnibus, planned by Kerouac himself before his death and completed by his biographer, Ann Charters, makes clear the ambition and accomplishment of Jack Kerouac’s “Legend of Duluoz”—the story of his life told in the course of his many “true-story novels.” As Kerouac once wrote, “The whole thing forms one enormous comedy, seen through the eyes of poor Ti Jean (me), otherwise known as Jack Duluoz, the world of raging action and folly and also of gentle sweetness seen through the keyhole of his eye.”

This compilation presents selections from the “Legend of Duluoz” novels, in chronological order, from Dr. Sax to On the Road to Big Sur, and also includes poetry, letters, and essays on Buddhism, writing, and the Beat Generation. The Portable Jack Kerouac offers a total immersion in the mind of an American master.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha

by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac's profound meditations on the Buddha's life and religion

In the mid-1950s, Jack Kerouac, a lifelong Catholic, became fascinated with Buddhism, an interest that had a significant impact on his ideas of spirituality and later found expression in such books as Mexico City Blues and The Dharma Bums. Originally written in 1955 and now published for the first time in paperback, Wake Up is Kerouac?s retelling of the life of Prince Siddhartha Gotama, who as a young man abandoned his wealthy family and comfortable home for a lifelong search for enlightenment. Distilled from a wide variety of canonical scriptures, Wake Up serves as both a penetrating account of the Buddha?s life and a concise primer on the principal teachings of Buddhism.

Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha

by Jack Kerouac

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 home for a lifelong search for Enlightenment. As a compendium of the teachings of the Buddha, Wake Up is a profound meditation on the nature of life, desire, wisdom, and suffering. Distilled from a wide variety of canonical scriptures, Wake Up serves as both a concise primer on the concepts of Buddhism and as an insightful and deeply personal document of Kerouac’s evolving beliefs. It is the work of a devoted spiritual follower of the Buddha who also happened to be one of the twentieth century’s most influential novelists. Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha will be essential reading for the legions of Jack Kerouac fans and for anyone who is curious about the spiritual principles of one of the world’s great religions.

The Dharma Bums (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac’s classic novel about friendship, the search for meaning, and the allure of nature—featuring an Introduction by Anne Douglas

“In [On the Road] Kerouac’s heroes were sensation seekers; now they are seekers after truth . . . the novel often attains a beautiful dignity.”—Chicago Tribune

First published in 1958, a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouac’s most powerful and influential novels. The story focuses on two ebullient young Americans—mountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder, and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writer—whose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Francisco’s Bohemia to solitude and mountain climbing in the High Sierras.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

On the Road: The Original Scroll (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Jack Kerouac

The legendary 1951 scroll draft of On the Road, published as Kerouac originally composed it

“The sparse and unassuming scroll is the living version [of On the Road] for our time. . . . It is a dazzling piece of writing.”—The New York Times Book Review

During three weeks in 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote the first draft of On the Road—typed as a long, single-spaced paragraph on eight sheets of tracing paper, which he taped together to form a scroll. Representing the identifiable point at which his vision and narrative voice first came together in a sustained burst of creative energy, the scroll is the “uncut” version of Kerouac’s masterpiece—rougher, wilder, and more sexually explicit than the edited work that appeared in 1957. On the Road: The Original Scroll is Kerouac’s signature achievement—and one of the most significant, celebrated, and provocative documents in American literary history.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Haunted Life: and Other Writings

by Jack Kerouac

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, however, Carr stabbed his longtime acquaintance and mentor David Kammerer to death in Riverside Park, claiming afterwards that he had been defending his manhood against Kammerer's persistent and unwanted advances. Kerouac was originally charged in Kammerer'a killing as an accessory after the fact as a result of his aiding Carr in disposing of the murder weapon and Kammerer's eyeglasses. Consequently, Kerouac was jailed in August 1944 and married his first wife, Edie Parker, on the twenty-second of that month in order to secure the money he needed for his bail bond. Eventually the authorities accepted Carr's account of the killing, trying him instead for manslaughter and thus nullifying the charges against Kerouac. At some point later in the year—under circumstances that remain rather mysterious—the aspiring writer lost a novella-length manuscript titled The Haunted Life, a coming of age story set in Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts.

Kerouac set his fictional treatment of Peter Martin against the backdrop of the everyday: the comings and goings of the shopping district, the banter and braggadocio that occurs within the smoky atmospherics of the corner bar, the drowsy sound of a baseball game over the radio. 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 other principal characters, Garabed Tourian and Dick Sheffield, are based respectively on Sebastian Sampas and fellow Lowellian Billy Chandler, both of whom had already died in combat by the time of Kerouac's drafting of The Haunted Life (providing some of the impetus for its title). Garabed is a leftist idealist and poet, with a pronounced tinge of the Byronic. Dick is a romantic adventurer whose wanderlust has him poised to leave Galloway for the wider world—with or without Peter. The Haunted Life also contains a compelling and controversial portrayal of Jack's father, Leo Kerouac, recast as Joe Martin. Opposite of Garabed's progressive, New Deal persepctive, Joe is a right-wing and bigoted populist, and an ardent admirer of radio personality Father Charles Coughlin. The conflicts of the novella are primarily intellectual, then, as Peter finds himself suspended between the differing views of history, politics, and the world embodied by the other three characters, and struggles to define what he believes to be intellectually true and worthy of his life and talents.

The Haunted Life, skillfully edited by University of Massachusetts at Lowell Assistant Professor of English Todd F. Tietchen, 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.

The Haunted Life: and Other Writings

by Jack Kerouac

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, however, Carr stabbed his longtime acquaintance and mentor David Kammerer to death in Riverside Park, claiming afterwards that he had been defending his manhood against Kammerer's persistent and unwanted advances. Kerouac was originally charged in Kammerer'a killing as an accessory after the fact as a result of his aiding Carr in disposing of the murder weapon and Kammerer's eyeglasses. Consequently, Kerouac was jailed in August 1944 and married his first wife, Edie Parker, on the twenty-second of that month in order to secure the money he needed for his bail bond. Eventually the authorities accepted Carr's account of the killing, trying him instead for manslaughter and thus nullifying the charges against Kerouac. At some point later in the year -- under circumstances that remain rather mysterious -- the aspiring writer lost a novella-length manuscript titled The Haunted Life, a coming of age story set in Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts.

Kerouac set his fictional treatment of Peter Martin against the backdrop of the everyday: the comings and goings of the shopping district, the banter and braggadocio that occurs within the smoky atmospherics of the corner bar, the drowsy sound of a baseball game over the radio. 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 other principal characters, Garabed Tourian and Dick Sheffield, are based respectively on Sebastian Sampas and fellow Lowellian Billy Chandler, both of whom had already died in combat by the time of Kerouac's drafting of The Haunted Life (providing some of the impetus for its title). Garabed is a leftist idealist and poet, with a pronounced tinge of the Byronic. Dick is a romantic adventurer whose wanderlust has him poised to leave Galloway for the wider world -- with or without Peter. The Haunted Life also contains a compelling and controversial portrayal of Jack's father, Leo Kerouac, recast as Joe Martin. Opposite of Garabed's progressive, New Deal persepctive, Joe is a right-wing and bigoted populist, and an ardent admirer of radio personality Father Charles Coughlin. The conflicts of the novella are primarily intellectual, then, as Peter finds himself suspended between the differing views of history, politics, and the world embodied by the other three characters, and struggles to define what he believes to be intellectually true and worthy of his life and talents.

The Haunted Life, skillfully edited by University of Massachusetts at Lowell Assistant Professor of English Todd F. Tietchen, 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.

Sea is My Brother

by Jack Kerouac

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 officially launched his writing career, The Sea Is My Brother marks a pivotal point in which Kerouac began laying the foundations for his pioneering method and signature style. 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 bears all 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 and apartments engaged in intense conversation, the desperate urge to escape from society, and the strange, terrible beauty of loneliness.

On the Road: The Original Scroll

by Jack Kerouac

This is the original scroll: the first ever publication of Kerouac's original draft for the book - transcribed from the famous 'scroll': hundreds of typed pages which constitute the manuscript taped together by Kerouac himself.

The Dharma Bums: 50th Anniversary Edition

by Jack Kerouac

A deluxe edition of Kerouac?s masterpiece on the 50th anniversary of its first publication

First published in 1958, a year after On the Road had put the Beat generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouac?s most powerful, influential, and bestselling novels. The story focuses on two untrammeled young Americans?mountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writer?whose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Francisco?s Bohemia to solitude and mountain climbing in the High Sierras to Ray?s sixty-day vigil by himself atop Desolation Peak in Washington State. Primary to this evocative and soulful novel is an honest, exuberant search for an affirmative way of life in the midst of the atomic age. In many ways, The Dharma Bums also presaged the environmental, back-to-the-land, and American Buddhist movements of the 1960s and beyond.

Old Angel Midnight (City Lights/Grey Fox)

by Jack Kerouac

"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

The Mammoth Book of Tales from the Road: Tales of Life on the Move (Mammoth Books)

by John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S Thompson, J. G. Ballard

Combining classic stories with never-before-published work, The Mammoth Book of Tales from the Road travels along exotic as well as familiar pathways, covering territory from the erotic and romantic, to the chilling, adventurous, and humorous. From trails carved through dense jungle to six-lane superhighways, these travelers’ tales comprise cops and robbers barrelling down mean streets, summer roadtrip vacations gone wildly wrong, sentimental journeys made in hope and despair, wandering wise men, and post-apocalyptic road warriors. Created by master anthologist Maxim Jakubowski, this Mammoth collection features a mixture of legendary road stories plus a selection of brand-new, especially commissioned pieces. Includes excerpts from classics such as Kerouac’s On the Road, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, and James Ellroy’s Killer on the Road. There are also complete reprints of favorite stories such as John Hughes’s “Vacation ‘58” and hidden gems by the likes of Ed McBain, Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs, Brian W. Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, Lee Child, and Michael Dibden. The Mammoth Book of Tales from the Road also picks up new works from contemporary authors such as Alex Garland, Thomas S. Roche, Matt Thorne, Stella Duffy, and many others.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

by Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs

More than sixty years ago, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac sat down inNew York City to write a novel about the summer of 1944, when one of their friends killed another in a moment of brutal and tragic bloodshed. The two authors were then at the dawn of their careers, having yet to write anything of note. Alternating chapters and narrators, Burroughs and Kerouac pieced together a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and obsession, art and violence. The manuscript, called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks after a line from a news story about a fire at a circus, was submitted to publishers but rejected and confined to a filing cabinet for decades. This legendary collaboration between two of the twentieth centuries most influential writers is set to be published for the first time in the fall of 2008. A remarkable, fascinating piece of American literary history, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is also an engrossing, atmospheric novel that brings to life a shocking murder at the dawn of the Beat Generation.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

by Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs

The legendary novel whose true events inspired the film KILL YOUR DARLINGS

In the summer of 1944, a shocking murder rocked the fledgling Beats. William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, both still unknown, we inspired by the crime to collaborate on a novel, a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and art, obsession and brutality, with scenes and characters drawn from their own lives. Finally published after more than sixty years, this is a captivating read, and incomparable literary artifact, and a window into the lives and art of two of the twentieth century’s most influential writers.

Dr. Sax

by Jack Kerouac

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 as he relates Jack’s adventures with this cryptic, apocalyptic hipster phantom.

Mexico City Blues: 242 Choruses

by Jack Kerouac

One of the renowned Beat writer’s most formally inventive books, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac’s essential work of lyric verse, now reissued following his centenary celebration
Written between 1954 and 1957, and published originally by Grove Press in 1959, Mexico City Blues is Kerouac’s most important verse work. It incorporates all the elements of his theory of spontaneous composition and his interest in Buddhism. Memories, fantasies, dreams, and surrealistic free association are lyrically combined in the loose format inspired by jazz and the blues. Written while Kerouac was living in Mexico City, and with references to William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Bill Garver, this exciting book in Kerouac’s oeuvre is an original and moving epic of sound, rhythm, and religion.

Subterraneans (Kerouac, Jack)

by Jack Kerouac

From the most famous of the Beat writers and the author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s intoxicating love story of two young bohemians, now reissued in the centenary year of his birth
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 romance and 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 mainstream America’s field of vision. Loosely based on Kerouac’s own life, and peopled with analogues of real-life friends, including William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady, The Subterraneans is a vivid and breathless masterwork of Beat literature.

Satori in Paris (Kerouac, Jack)

by Jack Kerouac

From the renowned Beat writer, Kerouac’s colorful and meandering search for his family history, now reissued following his centenary celebration
Satori 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 of strangers and all-night conversations in seedy bars, to a pivotal cab ride in which he experiences Buddhism’s satori―a feeling of sudden understanding―Kerouac’s affecting and revolutionary writing transports the reader. Published at the height of his fame and showcasing his mature talent, Satori in Paris is a lyrical, rollicking tale of philosophy, identity, and the power and strangeness of travel.

You're a Genius All the Time: Belief and Technique for Modern Prose

by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac's musings on the creative process are collected together for the first time in this exquisite book. Inthe 1950s Allen Ginsberg asked Kerouac to formally describe his "spontaneous prose" method, resulting in a list of maxims called Belief and Technique for Modern Prose. Kerouac entertains with sage advice, whether he's offering a sublime reminder to "believe in the holy contour of life" or a practical admonition to "accept loss forever." With aforeword by Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich and select photos from the Kerouac Estate, You're a Genius All theTime is a beautiful and intimate work of inspiration.

Book of Dreams

by Jack Kerouac

Book of Dreams is Jack Kerouac's record of his dream life, a parallel autobiography of the soul, the sleeper's On the Road:
"I got my weary bones out of bed & through eyes swollen with sleep swiftly scribbled in pencil in my little dream notebook till I had exhausted every rememberable item … "
Awake of asleep, Jack's mind spun the web of relationships that were the substance of almost everything he wrote:
"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."

Beat Generation: The Lost Work

by Jack Kerouac

Beat Generation is a play about tension, about friendship, and about karma — what it is and how you get it. It begins one fine morning with a few friends, honest laborers some of them, some close to being down-and-out, passing around a bottle of wine. It ends with a kind of satori-like reaffirmation of the power of friendship, of doing good through not doing, and the intrinsic worth of the throw-away little exchanges that make up our lives. Written in 1957, the same year that On the Road was first published, and set in 1953, Beat Generation portrays an authentic and alternate 1950s America. Kerouac's characters are working-class men and women — a step away from vagrants, but not a big step. Their dialogue positively sings, suggesting jazz riffs in their rhythm and content, and Kerouac, like a master composer, arranges it to magical effect. Here is the heart and soul of the beat mentality, the zeitgeist that blossomed over the decades and eventually culminated in the counter-culture of 1960s America. It's a spirit that still lives.

Robert Frank: The Americans

by Jack Kerouac, Robert Frank

A celebrated return of Robert Frank’s seminal photobook, The Americans, to Aperture's catalog—one of the most important bodies of photographic work ever made
In the nearly seven decades since its publication in France in 1958, and in the United States in 1959, Robert Frank’s The Americans has become one of the most influential and enduring works of American photography. Through eighty-three photographs taken across the country, Frank unveiled an America that had gone previously unacknowledged—confronting its people with an underbelly of racial inequality, corruption and injustice, and the stark reality of the American Dream. Frank’s point of view—at once startling and tenacious—is imbued with humanity and lyricism, painting a poignant and incomparable portrait of the nation at a turning point in history.
This edition of The Americans is a celebrated return of an iconic title to Aperture’s catalog, more than a half-century after the Aperture and Museum of Modern Art edition was published in 1968. Presented on the centennial of Frank’s birth and a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, it has been produced following the finest tritone printing from the 2008 edition for which Frank was personally involved in every step of the design and production.
Frank’s exacting vision, distinct style, and poetic insight changed the course of twentieth-century photography, and influenced subsequent generations of photographers, including Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Danny Lyon, Joel Meyerowitz, Ed Ruscha, and Gary Winogrand. Now extolled as one of the most groundbreaking photobooks of all time, The Americans remains as powerful and provocative as it was upon publication and continues to resonate with audiences today.

Jack Kerouac: Road Novels 1957-1960: On the Road / The Dharma Bums / The Subterraneans / Tristessa / Lonesome Traveler / Journal Selections (Library of America)

by Jack Kerouac

The raucous, exuberant, often wildly funny account of a journey through America and Mexico, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road instantly defined a generation on its publication in 1957: it was, in the words of a New York Times reviewer, “the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat.’” Written in the mode of ecstatic improvisation that Allen Ginsberg described as “spontaneous bop prosody,” Kerouac’s novel remains electrifying in its thirst for experience and its defiant rebuke of American conformity.

In his portrayal of the fervent relationship between the writer Sal Paradise and his outrageous, exasperating, and inimitable friend Dean Moriarty, Kerouac created one of the great friendships in American literature; and his rendering of the cities and highways and wildernesses that his characters restlessly explore is a hallucinatory travelogue of a nation he both mourns and celebrates. Now, The Library of America collects On the Road together with four other autobiographical “road books” published during a remarkable four-year period.

The Dharma Bums (1958), at once an exploration of Buddhist spirituality and an account of the Bay Area poetry scene, is notable for its thinly veiled portraits of Kerouac’s acquaintances, including Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Kenneth Rexroth. The Subterraneans (1958) recounts a love affair set amid the bars and bohemian haunts of San Francisco. Tristessa (1960) is a melancholy novella describing a relationship with a prostitute in Mexico City. Lonesome Traveler (1960) collects travel essays that evoke journeys in Mexico and Europe, and concludes with an elegiac lament for the lost world of the American hobo. Also included in Road Novels are selections from Kerouac’s journal, which provide a fascinating perspective on his early impressions of material eventually incorporated into On the Road.

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.

The Unknown Kerouac (LOA #283): Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings (Library of America Jack Kerouac Edition)

by Jack Kerouac

This remarkable gathering of previously unpublished writings shines new light on the On the Road author’s life, from his French Canadian childhood to his meteoric rise to literary fame

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.

Jack Kerouac: Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur (LOA #262) (Library of America Jack Kerouac Edition)

by Jack Kerouac

An authoritative edition of three Beat novels by the legendary author of On the Road. The third volume in The Library of America’s edition of the writings of Jack Kerouac opens with Visions of Cody, the groundbreaking work originally written in the early 1950s and published posthumously in 1972, in which Kerouac first treats the material later immortalized in On the Road. In it he moves beyond his early literary models to discover his own unique “bop prosody,” mixing closely observed description, free-form scats, and transcribed conversation to create an impassioned and hallucinatory portrait of his friend and idol Neal Cassady, here reimagined as Cody Pomeray. 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 and celebrity, a fateful decision that leads to a dangerous affair with Pomeray’s mistress, a nightmarish alcohol-fueled breakdown, and a desperate struggle for sobriety.

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.

Self-Portrait

by Jack Kerouac, Celia Paul

A collection of previously unpublished writing culled from the Kerouac archive

Jack Kerouac’s archive is vast. Throughout his life he was constantly writing, and he meticulously saved and catalogued his material. The result is that beyond the work published in his lifetime there has been a rich stream of posthumous writing that is far from tapped, adding depth to his lifework—the Duluoz Legend—and our understanding of Kerouac the man. Far from being the adrenalized thrill-seeker that he depicted in On the Road’s Dean Moriarty, Kerouac himself was deeply spiritual, shy, and reclusive. He sought adventures for the sake of experience, needing them to fuel his writing, which according to him was his sole reason for living. Few people sacrificed more for their art.

This collection of previously unpublished writing culled from the Kerouac archive, and as a companion to Paul Maher Jr.'s Becoming Kerouac, spans Kerouac’s adult life, from a journal written at age seventeen to autobiographical reflections a few years before his death. Self-Portrait is a blend of fictional and nonfictional pieces, a few abandoned starts but most complete in themselves and all of them chosen for the revelations they contain.
In The Moon and Sixpence,Somerset Maugham wrote, “A man’s work reveals him… No one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.” There are more than two dozen Kerouac biographies, but Self-Portrait reveals the artist in his own words, from his early ambition to the deep self-examination of his “Self-Ultimacy” period, his three-year struggle to write On the Road, musings about himself and America in the half-dozen years before the novel was published and then in the aftermath amid his public withdrawal, suffering from alcoholism and hounded by fame. Through it all there are tortuous feelings about his family—love, guilt, duty, and betrayal. As fans of Kerouac have come to learn, reading his work is a visceral probe.

Self-Portrait

by Jack Kerouac, Celia Paul

A rich, penetrating memoir about the author's relationship with a flawed but influential figure—the painter Lucian Freud—and the satisfactions and struggles of a life lived through art.

One of Britain's most important contemporary painters, Celia Paul has written a reflective, intimate memoir of her life as an artist. Self-Portrait tells the artist's story in her own words, drawn from early journal entries as well as memory, of her childhood in India and her days as a art student at London's Slade School of Fine Art; of her intense decades-long relationship with the older esteemed painter Lucian Freud and the birth of their son; of the challenges of motherhood, the unresolvable conflict between caring for a child and remaining commited to art; of the "invisible skeins between people," the profound familial connections Paul communicates through her paintings of her mother and sisters; and finally, of the mystical presence in her own solitary vision of the world around her.

Self-Portrait is a powerful, liberating evocation of a life and of a life-long dedication to art.

The Beat Scene: Photographs by Burt Glinn

by Jack Kerouac

Unseen images of the Beats, including many—uniquely—in color
This magnificent volume features a remarkable collection of largely unseen photographs of the Beat Generation by renowned Magnum photographer Burt Glinn. This amazing, untouched treasure trove of images was discovered when Reel Art Press was working with Burt Glinn’s widow, Elena, on a larger retrospective of Glinn’s work. Archived with the negatives was a short essay by Jack Kerouac entitled "And This Is The Beat Nightlife of New York," which is published here alongside the photographs. The book features black-and-white shots, and also—uniquely, for images of this era—more than 70 in color. An extremely rare find, these photographs capture the raw energy of the Beat Generation in a way that has never been seen before in print.
The photographs were shot between 1957 and 1960 in New York and San Francisco and feature nearly everyone involved in the scene, including writers and artists such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, LeRoi Jones, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick and many more. Glinn was celebrated for his extraordinary talent as a social documentary photographer, and during his time with the Beats his camera captured the spirit of the counterculture—writers, musicians and artists meeting in cafes, bars and parties pursuing a truth and future the mainstream would and could not acknowledge.
This exquisite tome is an intimate and fresh insight into the lives of the legendary and influential bohemians and a celebration of Glinn’s inimitable talent.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Burt Glinn (1935–2008) was an American professional photographer who worked with Magnum Photos. He covered revolutionary leader Fidel Castro’s entrance into Havana, Cuba, and photographed people such as Andy Warhol and Helen Frankenthaler. In collaboration with the writer Laurens van der Post, Glinn published A Portrait of All the Russias (1967) and A Portrait of Japan (1968).

Kerouac: Beat Painting

by Jack Kerouac

Kerouac's spontaneous bop poetics in paint: a little-known side of the Beat icon
As well as being the author of novels that defined postwar America and helped launch the counterculture, Jack Kerouac was also a prolific painter and draftsman. But his artistic work―inspired by the artists of the New York School with whom Kerouac socialized in the late '50s―has remained largely unknown. Most of Kerouac's artworks were inherited by a relative and remained unseen in the author's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, for decades. Now, this new publication offers the chance to explore what Kerouac's unique vision looked like in paint and pencil.
Jack Kerouac: Beat Painting features 80 paintings and drawings by Kerouac, most of which have never before been published, shedding a completely new light on the father of the Beat Generation, and showing how he brought the same energy to visual art as he did to all of his other endeavors.
Looking at Kerouac's portraits (taking on everyone from Joan Crawford to William S. Burroughs) and exploring the artist's relationships to Europe, religion, fashion and New York in the 1950s, Jack Kerouac: Beat Painting takes readers on a journey through Kerouac's life, poetics and vision, analyzing his labyrinthine creative process and his place in American visual culture.
Alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg,
Jack Kerouac (1922–69) is considered one of the founders of the Beat Generation, a literary and artistic movement that arrived on the American scene in the late 1940s with an influential vision of spontaneity and liberation in life and art.

Robert Frank: Pull My Daisy

by Jack Kerouac

Documenting Robert Frank’s classic film of Beat Generation energy at its peak "First take best take," to paraphrase Allen Ginsberg, was for years the ethos presumed to have governed the making of Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie's classic Beat Generation film Pull My Daisy (1959)--until Leslie revealed in 1968 that its scenes had been as scripted and rehearsed as any Hollywood movie. Even Jack Kerouac's famous voiceover narration, which careens wonderfully in and out of sync with the action, was actually composed in advance, performed four times and then mixed from three separate takes. But the film remains a supreme document of Beat Generation energy at its peak, with several of its key players starring: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram, Richard Bellamy, Alice Neel, Sally Gross and Pablo Frank (Robert Frank's then-infant son). Based on an incident in the life of Beat muse Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn, Daisy tells the story of a railway brakeman whose painter wife has invited a respectable bishop over for dinner at their Bowery apartment. The brakeman's "Beatnik" friends crash the occasion, and the playful provocations ("Is baseball holy?") they put to the bishop ("Strange thoughts you young people have!") baffle the clergyman's propriety and expectation of a "civilized" evening. This book interweaves the script of Kerouac's narration with film stills, and also includes a 1961 introduction by Jerry Tallmer.

Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

by Jack Kerouac

Originally subtitled "An Adventurous Education, 1935-1946," 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 waters of the North Atlantic during World War II, and back to New York, where his friends are the writers who would one day become known as the Beat generation and where he published his first novel.
Written in 1967 from the vantage point ot the psychedelic sixties, Vanity of Duluoz gives a fascinating portrait of the young Kerouac, dedicated and disciplined in his determination from an early age to be an important American writer.

The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)

by Jack Kerouac

These classic Kerouac meditations, zen koans and prose poems express the poet’s beatific quest for peace and joy through oneness with the universe.
"The Scripture of the Golden Eternity is fueled by Kerouac's discerning meditation on the nature of impermanence & consciousness, subtle like the dharma it invokes. We're here to disappear, therefore let's be as vivid & generous as we can. The intelligence & compassion behind this text is still alive."—Anne Waldman, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
Scripture of the Golden Eternity is Jack Kerouac's statement of confidence in his oneness with the universe of energy and form, a confidence to which his whole being swelled. His was not the search for the ecstasy of the mystic or psychedelic or the Artaud-mad. He sought a recognition in philosophy of his early sense that his body participated in the universal forms of energy with a quality of exuberance—that 'serious exuberance' which he so accurately called jazz."—Eric Mottram, Introduction
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 Road, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Cody, Pomes All Sizes (City Lights), Scattered Poems (City Lights) and The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (City Lights).

Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems (LOA #231) (Library of America Jack Kerouac Edition)

by Jack Kerouac

Poetry was at the center of Jack Kerouac’s sense of mission as a writer. This landmark edition brings together for the first time all Kerouac’s major poetic works—Mexico City Blues, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, Book of Blues, Pomes All Sizes, Old Angel Midnight, Book of Haikus—along with a rich assortment of his uncollected poems, six published here for the first time. He wrote poetry in every period of his life, in forms as diverse as the classical Japanese haiku, the Buddhist sutra, the spontaneous prose poetry of Old Angel Midnight, and the poetic “blues” he developed in Mexico City Blues and other serial works, seeing himself as “a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday.” Many poets found Kerouac a liberating influence on their work: Robert Creeley called him “a genius at the register of the speaking voice”; for Allen Ginsberg he was “a poetic influence over the entire planet”; and Bob Dylan said that Mexico City Blues was crucial to his own artistic development.
Also available in specially-designed jacket (978-1-59853-194-7)

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.

Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems (The Library of America)

by Jack Kerouac

Poetry was at the center of Jack Kerouac’s sense of mission as a writer. This landmark edition brings together for the first time all Kerouac’s major poetic works—Mexico City Blues, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, Book of Blues, Pomes All Sizes, Old Angel Midnight, Book of Haikus—along with a rich assortment of his uncollected poems, six published here for the first time. He wrote poetry in every period of his life, in forms as diverse as the classical Japanese haiku, the Buddhist sutra, the spontaneous prose poetry of Old Angel Midnight, and the poetic “blues” he developed in Mexico City Blues and other serial works, seeing himself as “a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday.” Many poets found Kerouac a liberating influence on their work: Robert Creeley called him “a genius at the register of the speaking voice”; for Allen Ginsberg he was “a poetic influence over the entire planet”; and Bob Dylan said that Mexico City Blues was crucial to his own artistic development.

Also available in traditional Library of America series jacket (978-1-59853-193-0)

On the Road (Penguin Orange Collection)

by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac’s classic American novel of freedom and the search for originality that defined a generation

“An authentic work of art.”—The New York Times

Inspired by Jack Kerouac’s adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naïveté and wild abandon and imbued with Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope—a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.

The Buddhist Years

by Jack Kerouac

A brand new volume of previously unpublished writings from the archives reflecting Jack Kerouac's Buddhist thinking

From a young age Kerouac was a spiritual thinker and questioner, and he always considered himself a spiritual writer. Buddhism gave more meaning to Jack's work as a writer: he was working not for personal accomplishment and glory but for human betterment. And Buddhism justified his lifestyle: with its vision of the material world as empty and illusory, he was free to do what he wanted.

This collection shows Jack at his earnest, soulful best. The writing is consistently and wonderfully Kerouacian: it is honest, reflective, heartfelt, and revealing, with great characterizations amid his self-exploration as he wrestles with his consciousness, desperate for belief.

Mexico City Blues 242 Choruses

by Jack Kerouac

One of the renowned Beat writer's most formally inventive books, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac's essential work of lyric verse, now reissued following his centenary celebration

Written between 1954 and 1957, and published originally by Grove Press in 1959, Mexico City Blues is Kerouac's most important verse work. It incorporates all the elements of his theory of spontaneous composition and his interest in Buddhism. Memories, fantasies, dreams, and surrealistic free association are lyrically combined in the loose format inspired by jazz and the blues. Written while Kerouac was living in Mexico City, and with references to William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Bill Garver, this exciting book in Kerouac's oeuvre is an original and moving epic of sound, rhythm, and religion.