Showing results by author "Jack Kerouac" in All Categories

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.

This novella tells the story of a ten-year-old Black boy named Pictorial Review “Pic” Jackson, who lives with his grandfather in North Carolina in the 1940s. After his grandfather dies and Pic is living with another relative, his older brother, Slim, shows up to take him out of that dysfunctional home, and they journey from the rural South to New York City. They head for Harlem, where Slim lives with his girlfriend and where Pic sees firsthand the economic hard times his brother is experiencing. After losing job after job, Slim sends his pregnant girlfriend off to San Francisco.

Una de las obras capitales de Jack Kerouac, el escritor paradigmático de la Generación Beat. Ambientada en California, expone su descubrimiento del budismo y su primera ley, "la vida es sufrimiento", durante la época en que se sentía un fracasado al no encontrar editor para sus libros. Pero además de un modo filosófico de encarar el fracaso y de la búsqueda del auténtico significado –el Dharma– por parte de unos jóvenes desharrapados y febriles, Los Vagabundos del Dharma expresa la comunión con la naturaleza en la cima de altas montañas, la fraternidad y la poesía.

Jack Kerouac tells the story of Jack Duluoz, a French-Canadian boy growing up in Kerouac’s own birthplace, the dingy factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts. There, Doctor Sax, with his flowing cape, slouched hat, and insinuating leer, is chief among the many ghosts and demons that populate Jack’s fantasy world.

Atop an Underwood brings together more than sixty previously unpublished works that Kerouac wrote before he was twenty-two, ranging from stories and poems to plays and parts of novels, including an excerpt from his 1943 merchant marine novel, The Sea Is My Brother. These writings reveal what Kerouac was thinking, doing, and dreaming during his formative years and reflect his primary literary influences. Listeners will also find in these works the source of Kerouac’s spontaneous prose style.

Alla radice di questo romanzo, pubblicato nel 1958 e subito processato per oscenità, c'è una vicenda reale, la storia d'amore vissuta da Kerouac con una ragazza di colore, che in queste pagine rivive come in una confessione tanto difficile quanto liberatoria. Al centro, la figura di Mardou, sensuale, fascinosa, attorno alla quale gira, ossessivamente, la vita dell'amante, e la città stessa (New York nella realtà, San Francisco nella finzione letteraria): una città onirica, cupa, frenetica, piena di alcol, di droghe, di sesso, di arte e di vita.

"I vagabondi del Dharma" rappresenta il seguito ideale del romanzo più celebre di Kerouac, quel "Sulla strada" considerato fin dal suo primo apparire una sorta di "Bibbia della Beat Generation". Anche nei "Vagabondi", sempre di forte matrice autobiografica, lo scrittore racconta le avventure dei suoi discepoli e confratelli beatnik impegnati nella ricerca, disordinata ma sincera, di una nuova verità. Verità che, soprattutto grazie all'influsso della scuola Zen di San Francisco, Kerouac e i suoi identificano con gli insegnamenti buddhisti.

Sal Paradise, un giovane newyorkese con ambizioni letterarie, incontra Dean Moriarty, un ragazzo dell'Ovest. Uscito dal riformatorio, Dean comincia a girovagare sfidando le regole della vita borghese, sempre alla ricerca di esperienze intense. Dean decide di ripartire per l'Ovest e Sal lo raggiunge; è il primo di una serie di viaggi che imprimono una dimensione nuova alla vita di Sal.

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 Lowell, 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.

Jack Kerouac tells the story of Jack Duluoz, a French-Canadian boy growing up in Kerouac’s own birthplace, the dingy factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts. There, Doctor Sax, with his flowing cape, slouched 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 textures of his boyhood in Lowell in this novel of a cryptic, apocalyptic hipster phantom.

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 spending ten days in France searching for his French heritage. Was the satori handed to him by a taxi driver, a waiter, a monsieur with a dazzlingly beautiful secretary, or while feeling fearful in the foggy streets at 3:00 a.m.? Or was it when hearing a requiem by Mozart in an old church, seeing trees in the Tuileries Garden, or while walking on a bridge over the River Seine?