Biographical noteJack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. In 1947, enthused by bebop, the rebel attitude of his friend Neal Cassady, and the throng of hobos, drug addicts and hustlers he encountered in New York, he decided to discover America and hitchhike across the country. His writing was openly autobiographical and he developed a style he referred to as 'spontaneous prose' which he used to record the experiences of the Beat Generation. Kerouac wrote a number of hugely influential and popular novels - most famously the international best-seller On the Road. Among his many other novels are Visions of Cody, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums and Big Sur. As much as anything, he came to represent a philosophy, a way of life. He died in 1969. Main descriptionFrom the bard of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac's Maggie Cassidy is an autobiographical novel of young love, published in Penguin Modern Classics. Though publishers stopped Maggie Cassidy's Jack Duluoz and On the Road's Sal Paradise from sharing the same name, Kerouac meant the books to be two parts of the same life. While On the Road made Paradise (and Kerouac) a hero for generations to come of the disaffected and restless, Maggie Cassidy is an affectionate portrait of the teenager that made the man - of friendship and first love growing up in a New England mill town. Duluoz is a high school athletics and football star who meets Maggie Cassidy and begins a devoted, inconstant, tender adolescent love affair. It is one of the most sustained, poetic pieces of Kerouac's 'spontaneous prose'. Jack Kerouac (1922-69) was an American novelist, poet, artist and part of the Beat Generation. His first published novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957, that made Kerouac famous. Publication of his many other books followed, among them The Subterraneans, Big Sur, and The Dharma Bums. Kerouac died in Florida at the age of forty-seven. If you enjoyed Maggie Cassidy, you might like Kerouac's The Subterraneans and Pic, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'A very unique cat - a French Canadian Hinayana Buddhist Beat Catholic savant' Allen Ginsberg
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.
The classic novel of freedom and the search for authenticity that defined a generation September 5th, 2017 marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of On the Road 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. Kerouacs 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.
In 1944, Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughs were charged as accessories to murder. Their friends Lucien Carr, had stabbed another, David Kammerrer. Carr had come to each of them and confessed - neither told the police. For this failing they were arrested. This book presents a fictionalized account of the summer of the killing.
Jack Kerouac''s Great American Novel, now in a delightful new Clothbound Classics editionbr>br>On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion.>
