Jack Kerouac

Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had previously known about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic. Sal Paradise, a young innocent, joins the slightly crazed Dean Moriarty on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz...

A reproduction of Kerouac's original 1951 scroll draft of "On the Road" offers insight into the writer's thematic vision and narrative voice as influenced by the American literary, musical, and visual arts of the post-World War II period.

In Jack Kerouac's teenage years his friends gave him a nickname that was prescient and stuck with him throughout his life-Memory Babe. Kerouac was able to conjure up scenes from his childhood and adolescence that astounded his friends with their precision and detail. This talent was to serve him well as a novelist, enabling him to recall long segments of conversation that he could instantly pound out on his typewriter. Maggie Cassidy is one of Kerouac's...

A quintessential American family is pulled apart by war and the rapidly changing tides of society in Jack Kerouac's captivating first novel Published 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...

"All three [novels] were seen by Kerouac as forming part of The Duluoz Legend, a multivolume autobiographical saga recording the major events of the author's life"--Page 761.

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 fascinating details and insight into the early life and development of an American literary icon. Kerouac chronicles the misadventures of two seamen who seem different,...

In 1964, Paul Carpetti discovers Jack Kerouac's On the Road while on a school trip to New York and begins to question the life he faces after high school. Then he meets a volatile, charismatic Kerouac devotee determined to hit the road himself. When the boys learn that Kerouac is living in St. Petersburg, Florida, they go looking for answers.