Jack Kerouac

As he travels across 1950s America, aspiring writer Sal Paradise chronicles his escapades with the charismatic Dean Moriarty. Sal admires Dean's passion for experiencing as much as possible of life and his wild flights of poetic fancy. On the Road memorializes the author's real-life adventures with Neal Cassady and epitomizes what comes to be known as "the Beat generation."

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

...

In the mid-1950s Jack Kerouac, a lifelong Catholic, became fascinated with Buddhism, an interest that had a profound 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 book form, Wake Up is Kerouac’s retelling of the life of Prince Siddartha Gotama, who as a young man abandoned his wealthy family...

Presents a collection of never-before-published and newly translated writings by the legendary author and provides insight into his path to a wholly new style of storytelling.

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, Poems 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...

"In the summer of 1956, Jack Kerouac hitchhiked from Mill Valley, CA, 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 enlightenment. He wrote in his journal that he planned 'to concentrate on emptiness of self, other selves, living beings, and universal self.' In letters to friends he...

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,...