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Jack Kerouac: Novels, Poems, & Other Writings (four volumes)

Edited by Todd Tietchen , Douglas Brinkley and Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell

Overview

Overview

The Library of America edition of Jack Kerouac’s contains the following four volumes:

Road Novels 1957–1960
The raucous, exuberant, often wildly funny account of a journey through America and Mexico, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road instantly defined a generation on its publication in 1957: it was, in the words of a New York Times reviewer, “the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat.’” In his portrayal of the fervent relationship between the writer Sal Paradise and his outrageous, exasperating, and inimitable friend Dean Moriarty, Kerouac created one of the great friendships in American literature; and his rendering of the cities and highways and wildernesses that his characters restlessly explore is a hallucinatory travelogue of a nation he both mourns and celebrates. Now, The Library of America collects On the Road together with four other autobiographical “road books” published during a remarkable four-year period.

Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur
Completed in 1952, Visions of Cody was not published in full until 1972, three years after Kerouac’s death. Perhaps the most experimental of all his books, it is the other masterpiece drawn from the experiences and encounters behind On the Road, centered on an impassioned and hallucinatory portrait of his friend and idol Neal Cassady, here reimagined as Cody Pomeray. Written in a matter of weeks just after Christmas 1955 and published in 1963, Visions of Gerard_—“my best most serious sad and true book yet”—is a meditation on Kerouac’s older brother, who died at age nine of rheumatic fever, and who became for him an emblem of innocence and saintliness. The intensely focused and sometimes despairing _Big Sur (1962) chronicles a 1960 trip to California intended as a restorative return but culminating in a nightmarish breakdown that Kerouac unflinchingly describes.

Collected Poems
Poetry was at the center of Jack Kerouac’s sense of mission as a writer. “I’d better be a poet / Or lay down dead,” he wrote in “San Francisco Blues.” The celebrated “spontaneous bop prosody” of his prose was a direct outgrowth of the poetry that filled his notebooks throughout his writing life. This landmark edition gathers for the first time all of Kerouac’s major poetic works, along with a rich assortment of his uncollected poems, six published here for the first time.

The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings
Edited and published with unprecedented access to the Kerouac archives, The Unknown Kerouac presents two lost novels discovered among his papers in the mid-nineties, The Night Is My Woman and Old Bull in the Bowery, which Kerouac wrote in French during the especially fruitful years of 1951 and 1952. In Private Philologies, Riddles, and a Ten-Day Writing Log, Kerouac recounts a brief stay in Denver—where he works on an early version of On the Road, reads dime novels, and even rides in a rodeo—and shows him contemplating writers like Chaucer and Joyce and playing with riddles and etymologies. Journal 1951, begun during a stay in a Bronx VA hospital, charts the wave of insights and breakthroughs that led Kerouac to the most singular transformation of American prose style since Hemingway. The memoir Memory Babe is a poignant evocation of childhood play and reverie in a robust immigrant community, in which Kerouac uncannily retrieves and distills the subtlest sense impressions.

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2944 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

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