Jack Kerouac

More than sixty years ago, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, two novice writers at the dawn of their careers, sat down to write a novel about the summer of 1944, when one of their friends killed another in a moment of brutal and tragic bloodshed. Alternating chapters, they pieced together a...

Jack Kerouac's follow up to On the Road read by his fellow Beat Generation icon Allen Ginsberg. Ray Smith is a young man seeking a life of simplicity and truth. Another young man, Japhy Rhyder, becomes instrumental in leading Ray to Buddhism as they embark upon a spiritual quest. Their journey...

Arguably his finest post-On the Road novel, Big Sur captures Kerouac (here named Jack Duluoz) trying to escape the clamor of beatnik adulation....

Kerouac fell under the spell of Esperanza's dark allure and exotic surroundings, and hoped to re-experience the "fellaheen nights" of his joyous adventures with Mexicans in his past....

Just as Jack Kerouac upended the conventions of the novel with On the Road, he also revolutionized American poetry in this ingenious collection. Bringing together selections from literary journals and his private notebooks, Jack Kerouac’s Scattered Poems exemplifies the Beat Generation...

While his masterpiece On the Road languished on the desks of unresponsive editors, Kerouac turned to Buddhism, and in 1953 began writing reading notes on the subject intended for his friend Allen Ginsberg. As his Buddhist study and meditation practice intensified, what had begun as notes evolved...

A 50th anniversary audiobook of Kerouac’s classic novel that defined a generation Few novels have had as profound an impact on American culture as On the Road. Pulsating with the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open road...

A brand new volume of previously unpublished writings from the archives reflecting Jack Kerouac’s Buddhist thinking From a young age Kerouac was a spiritual thinker and questioner, and he always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...

In the summer of 1956, Jack Kerouac hitchhiked from Mill Valley, California, to the North Cascades to spend two months serving as a fire lookout for the US Forest Service. Taking only the Diamond Sutra for reading material, he intended to spend his time in deep contemplation and to achieve...

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...

A poignant masterpiece of wrenching personal expression from the author of On the Road and The Dharma BumsIn 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...

Jack Duluoz (Kerouac) ha publicado una novela (En el camino) que ha alcanzado un gran éxito, pero la fama es como una fiera que lo devora. Huyendo de la imagen que los críticos y los lectores se han forjado de él, en junio de 1960 se refugia en una cabaña que su amigo Lorenzo Monsanto...

A satori, in Kerouac’s own words, is “the Japanese word for ‘sudden illumination,’ ‘sudden awakening,’ or simply ‘kick in the eye.’” This is a story of philosophy, identity, and the powerful grip of travel, written by an iconic American author at the height of his fame, after...

From the renowned Beat writer Jack Kerouac comes this important work of lyric verse, one of his most formally inventive books. A long poem in Kerouac’s freewheeling and spontaneous improvisational style, Mexico City Blues is a unique epic of sound, rhythm, and religion. Called superb sensory...

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...

Written in 1967 from the vantage point of the psychedelic sixties, Vanity of Duluoz is a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young man. This book presents the formative years in the life of Jack Duluoz—Kerouac’s alter ego—beginning with his high school experiences as a sporting jock in...

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...

From famed Beat writer Jack Kerouac comes a collection of essays and stories compiled from journal entries he made during his travels. In his first autobiographical work, Jack Kerouac reveals exhilarating stories of the years he spent traveling, while writing his acclaimed novels. His journeys...

Originally published in 1965, this autobiographical novel 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...

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. Nearly seventy years later, its long-awaited publication provides...