Jack Kerouac

The legendary 1951 scroll draft of On the Road, published word for word as Kerouac originally composed it
Though Jack Kerouac began thinking about the novel that was to become On the Road as early as 1947, it was not until three weeks in April 1951, in an apartment on West Twentieth Street in Manhattan, that he wrote the first full draft that was satisfactory to him. Typed out as one long, single-spaced paragraph on eight...

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...

Beat Generation great Jack Kerouac traverses the vast landscape of American counterculture in this raucous and insightful collection In these collected articles, essays, and wild autobiographical tales, Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, leads readers down the highways and through the myriad subcultures of mid-twentieth-century America, guiding them along with his ingenious observations and brilliant command of language. He cruises to San Francisco...

"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...

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 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...

Description of Big Sur Jack Kerouac shot to literary fame in 1957 with the publication of his iconic book of the Beat Generation, On the Road. Kerouac was termed "King of the Beats," a mantle he was entirely uncomfortable with. Along with Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and several others forged a new literary voice and attitude — it was a movement that often mocked and challenged the American status quo....