Jack Kerouac

This counterculture classic reveals the escapades of members of the beat generation as they seek pleasure and meaning while traveling coast to coast

On The Road

During the 1950s the search for Buddhist truths takes two young Bohemians through a series of bizarre experiences in California

The Dharma Bums

Big Sur

William S. Burroughs

A fictional account of the 1944 murder of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr, a friend of William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, features the two authors writing in alternating voices from the perspectives of a bartender and a hard-drinking merchant marine.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

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 mainstream America's field of vision.

The Subterraneans

As he roams the US, Mexico, Morocco, Paris and London, Kerouac records life on the road in prose of pure poetry. Standing on the engine of a train as it rushes past fields of prickly cactus; witnessing his first bullfight in Mexico while high on opium; meditating on a sunlit roof in Tangiers or falling in love with Montmartre - Kerouac reveals both the endless diversity of human life and his own particular philosophy of self-fulfillment.

Lonesome Traveler

Desolation angels

Paul Marion

An anthology of more than sixty previously unpublished early works, written by Kerouac between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one, features a wide range of stories, poems, and an excerpt from his merchant marine novel, The Sea Is My Brother. 22,500 first printing.

Early Stories and Other Writings

Atop an Underwood

Kerouac’s classic fictional tribute to Neal Cassady.

Visions of Cody

The Town and the City

Willa Cather

See my hand up-tipped, learn the secret of my human heart . . . ' Soaring, freewheeling snapshots of life on the road across America, from the Beat writer who inspired a generation.

Piers of the Homeless Night

On the Road

The story of Kerouac's visit to Paris and Brittany in search of his ancestors. On this hectic odyssey, fascinated by everything and everyone he met, from a faded French beauty in a Montparnasse gangster bar to one of his foppish Breton namesakes, Kerouac experienced a feeling of transcendence.

Satori in Paris

Described by Kerouac as being about "man's simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies", the 158-page handwritten manuscript was Kerouac's first novel, but was not published during his lifetime. He wrote in his notes for the project that the characters were "the vanishing American, the big free by, the American Indian, the last of the pioneers, the last of the hoboes". The novel follows the fortunes of Wesley Martin, a man who Kerouac said "loved the sea with a strange, lonely love; the sea is his brother and sentences. He goes down." Jack began this work not long after his first tour as a Merchant Marine on the S.S. Dorchester in the late summer of 1942 during which he kept a journal detailing the gritty daily routine of life at sea. Inspired by the trip, which exemplified Jack's love for adventure and the character traits of his fellow shipmates, the journals were spontaneous sketches of those experiences that were woven into a short novel soon after disembarking from the S.S. Dorchester in October of 1942.

The Lost Novel

The Sea is My Brother

Spontaneous poetry by the author of On the Road, gathered from underground and ephemeral publications; including "San Francisco Blues," the variant texts of "Pull My Daisy," and American haiku.

Pocket Poets Number 28

Scattered Poems

"My best most serious sad and true book yet." --Jack Kerouac "His life . . . ended when he was nine and the nuns of St. Louis de France Parochial School were at his bedside to take down his dying workds becase they'd heard his astonishing revelations of heaven delivered in catechism on no more encouragement than it was his turn to speak. . . ." Unique among Jack Kerouac's novels, Visions of Gerard focuses on the scenes and sensations of childhood--the wisdom, anguish, intensity, innocence, evil, insight, suffering, delight, and shock--as they were revealed in the short tragic-happy life of his saintly brother, Gerard. Set in Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, it is an unsettling, beautiful, and sad exploration of the meaning and precariousness of existence.

Visions of Gerard

Novel of adolescent love in a New England mill town.

Maggie Cassidy

A treasury of mid-'50s road poems, intoxication poems, dharma verse, Canuck patois elegy, haikus, and blues.

Pocket Poets Number 48

Pomes All Sizes

Based on Jack Kerouac's own real-life love affair in Mexico City, this is the story of a man's ill-fated relationship with a woman he portrays with tenderness and dignity, even as her life spirals out of control "Each book by Jack Kerouac is unique, a telepathic diamond. With prose set in the middle of his mind, he reveals consciousness itself in all its syntatic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion. Such rich natural writing is nonpareil in later half XX century, a synthesis of Proust, Céline, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Genet, Thelonius Monk, Basho, Charlie Parker, and Kerouac's own athletic sacred insight. "This entire short novel Tristessa's a narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a chihuaha dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junky lady, first in their crowded bedroom, then out to drunken streets, taco stands, & pads at dawn in Mexico City slums." —Allen Ginsberg

Jack Kerouac

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