On the Road is Jack Kerouac's ecstatic chronicle of movement, friendship, and spiritual hunger in postwar America. Following Sal Paradise and the magnetic Dean Moriarty across highways, jazz clubs, cities, and desert expanses, the novel transforms travel into a quest for authenticity beyond middle-class restraint. Its famously spontaneous prose—breathless, rhythmic, and indebted to bebop improvisation—helped define Beat literature, while its episodic structure captures the restless energy ...

The essential classic from legendary author, Jack Kerouac.

A quintessential American family is pulled apart by war and the rapidly changing tides of society in Jack Kerouac's captivating first novelPublished seven years before his iconic On the Road, Jack Kerouac's debut novel follows the experiences of one family as they navigate the seismic cultural shifts following World War II. Inspired by Kerouac's own New England youth, the eight Martin children enjoy an idyllic upbringing in a small Massachusetts mill-town. ...

Book of Dreams is an experimental novel published by Jack Kerouac in 1960, culled from the dream journal he kept from 1952 to 1960. In it Kerouac tries to continue plot-lines with characters from his books as he sees them in his dreams. This book is stylistically wild, spontaneous, and flowing, like much of Kerouac's writing, and helps to give insight into the Beat Generation author's mind.

The essential classic from legendary author, Jack Kerouac.

A sensory narrative poem capturing the rhythms of the universe and secrets of the subconscious with stunning linguistic dexterity from the author of On the RoadA spontaneous writing project in the form of an extended prose poem, this sonorous and spiritually playful book is one of Jack Kerouac's most boldly experimental works. Collected from five notebooks dating from 1956 to 1959—a time in which Kerouac was immersed in Buddhist theory— Old Angel Midnig...

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

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. Prior to the publication of On the Road, Ke...

A young man searches for meaning, creates art, and grapples with fame in this semiautobiographical Beat Generation classic by the author of On the Road.This urgently paced yet deeply introspective novel closely tracks Jack Kerouac’s own life. Jack Duluoz journeys from the Cascade Mountains to San Francisco, Mexico City, New York, and Tangier. While working as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the Cascades, Duluoz contemplates his inner void and the dist...

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was publishe...

Poetic meditations on joy, consciousness, and becoming one with the infinite universe from the author of On the RoadDuring an unexplained fainting spell, Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac experienced a flash of enlightenment. A student of Buddhist philosophy, Kerouac recognized the experience as "satori," a moment of life-changing epiphany. The knowledge he gained in that instant is expressed in this volume of sixty-six prose poems with language that is b...

Beat Generation great Jack Kerouac traverses the vast landscape of American counterculture in this raucous and insightful collectionIn 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 high on...