The legendary 1951 scroll draft of On the Road, published as Kerouac originally composed it

IN THREE WEEKS in April of 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote his first full draft of On the Road--typed as a single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing paper, which he later taped together to form a 120-foot scroll. A major literary event when it was published in Viking hardcover in 2007, this is the uncut version of an American classic--rougher, wilder, and more provocative than the official work that appeared, heavily edited, in 1957. This version, capturing a moment in...

Chronicles the passions, conflicts, and dreams of a group of bohemians searching for truth while studying at a university. This book offers a portrait of an artist as a young man and shows a writer in the process of finding the voice that would eventually express the spirit of his contemporaries.

The legendary novel whose true events inspired the film KILL YOUR DARLINGS

In the summer of 1944, a shocking murder rocked the fledgling Beats. William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, both still unknown, we inspired by the crime to collaborate on a novel, a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and art, obsession and brutality, with scenes and characters drawn from their own lives. Finally published after more than sixty years, this is a captivating read, and incomparable literary artifact, and a window into the lives and art of two of the...

Jack Kerouac's profound meditations on the Buddha's life and religion
In the mid-1950s, Jack Kerouac, a lifelong Catholic, became fascinated with Buddhism, an interest that had a significant 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 paperback, Wake Up is Kerouac's retelling of the life of Prince Siddhartha Gotama, who as a young man abandoned his wealthy family and comfortable home for a lifelong search for...

A poignant masterpiece of wrenching personal expression from the author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums
In this 1962 novel, Kerouac's alter ego Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of balance. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, Big Sur -reveals consciousness in all its syntactic...

In 1959 Avon Books published Jack Kerouac s tender look back at his high school years in Lowell, Massachusetts, Maggie Cassidy. One particular passage in the book, written in the form of a letter, contained certain thermo-nuclear profanities that weren t widely accepted in literature, even Beat literature, of that time period. As soon as Maggie Cassidy hit the shelves it upset bookstore owners and book distributors enough that the book was pulled, the passages rewritten, and a new, more politely correct version was issued and republished over the decades to come. The original manuscript has...

- An] essential Beat masterpiece.- --The Village Voice.
Perhaps one of the last great dual correspondences of the twentieth century, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters reveals not only the process of creation of the two most celebrated members of the Beat Generation, but also the unfolding of a remarkable friendship of immense pathos and spiritual depth. Through this exhilarating exchange of letters, two-thirds of which have never been published before, Kerouac and Ginsberg emerge first and foremost as writers of artistic passion, innovation, and genius....

In the spring of 1943, 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. A clear precursor to such landmark works as On the Road, The Dharma Bums, and Visions of Cody, it is an important formative work that hints at the hallmarks of classic Kerouac: the search for spiritual meaning in a...