Au milieu des années cinquante, nombreux sont les écrivains de la Beat Generation à s'intéresser au bouddhisme et à se tourner vers le haïku, dont la forme épurée fait écho à leur quête de spiritualité. Si Jack Kerouac n'est pas le premier à expérimenter cette tradition poétique, il est selon Allen Ginsberg « le seul maître du haïku ». Adaptant ces poèmes japonais de trois vers à la langue et à la culture américaines, il en vient à redéfinir le genre, qui l'accompagnera toute sa vie.
The town in this tale is Galloway, Massachusetts, birthplace of the five sons and three daughters of the Martin family in the early 1900s. The city is New York, the heaving melting pot which lures them all in search of futures and identity.
Sal Paradise, young and 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 becomes an exploration of personal freedom, a test of the limits of the American Dream.
Biographical noteJack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. In 1947, enthused by bebop, the rebel attitude of his friend Neal Cassady, and the throng of hobos, drug addicts and hustlers he encountered in New York, he decided to discover America and hitchhike across the country. His writing was openly autobiographical and he developed a style he referred to as 'spontaneous prose' which he used to record the experiences of the Beat Generation. Kerouac wrote a number of hugely influential and popular novels - most famously the international best-seller On the Road. Among his many other novels are Visions of Cody, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums and Big Sur. As much as anything, he came to represent a philosophy, a way of life. He died in 1969. Main descriptionFrom the bard of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac's Maggie Cassidy is an autobiographical novel of young love, published in Penguin Modern Classics. Though publishers stopped Maggie Cassidy's Jack Duluoz and On the Road's Sal Paradise from sharing the same name, Kerouac meant the books to be two parts of the same life. While On the Road made Paradise (and Kerouac) a hero for generations to come of the disaffected and restless, Maggie Cassidy is an affectionate portrait of the teenager that made the man - of friendship and first love growing up in a New England mill town. Duluoz is a high school athletics and football star who meets Maggie Cassidy and begins a devoted, inconstant, tender adolescent love affair. It is one of the most sustained, poetic pieces of Kerouac's 'spontaneous prose'. Jack Kerouac (1922-69) was an American novelist, poet, artist and part of the Beat Generation. His first published novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957, that made Kerouac famous. Publication of his many other books followed, among them The Subterraneans, Big Sur, and The Dharma Bums. Kerouac died in Florida at the age of forty-seven. If you enjoyed Maggie Cassidy, you might like Kerouac's The Subterraneans and Pic, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'A very unique cat - a French Canadian Hinayana Buddhist Beat Catholic savant' Allen Ginsberg
Written in 1957, but only recently rediscovered in manuscript form in a New Jersey warehouse, Beat Generation bears the hallmarks of vintage Kerouac: flowing, stream-of-consciousness language, orchestrated with a jazz-like sense of adventure and rhythm.
Au beau milieu de la frénésie des années cinquante, Jack Kerouac, à l'instar de beaucoup d'écrivains américains des générations précédentes, choisit l'errance, solution idéale pour un écrivain qui voulait retrouver l'Amérique mythique et l'homme dans sa pureté originelle. C'est dans l'étude du bouddhisme que naîtra son engouement pour la forme poétique épurée du haïku. Comme la graine qui contient l'arbre en germe, ces courts poèmes de trois vers seront autant de moments d'épiphanie ponctuant la difficile voie vers la sagesse. Kerouac apprend en pratiquant le haïku que la nature, bien que précaire et éphémère, n'en est pas moins principe de changement et de diversité. Tout naît, puis tout meurt pour renaître à nouveau. La souffrance et la mort sont là simplement, intrinsèquement, inscrites dans la vie même. À travers l'expérience spirituelle du haïku, Kerouac les dédramatise, les voit comme elles sont, loin de toute considération affective et intellectuelle, loin de tout dualisme.
'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.
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.
A semi-autobiographical tale of Kerouac's own trip to France, to trace his ancestors and explore his own understanding of the Buddhism that came to define his beliefs.
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.
The Haunted Life is the coming-of-age story of Peter Martin, a college track star determined to idle away what he knows will be one of his last innocent summers in his tranquil New England home town. But with the war escalating in Europe and his two closest friends both plotting their escapes, he realizes how sheltered his upbringing has been. As he surveys the competing influences of his youth, he struggles to determine what might lead to an intellectually authentic life. The Haunted Life is ultimately a meditation on intellectual truth, male friendship and the desire for movement - all themes that would dominate Kerouac's later work.
La colección «Conocer una obra» os ofrece la posibilidad de saberlo todo sobre En el camino de Jack Kerouac, gracias a una guia de lectura tan completa como detallada.
Su escritura, clara y accesible, fue confiada a un especialista académico. Esta guia de lectura responde a unos estandares de calidad definidos por un equipo de profesores. Este libro contiene la biografia de Jack Kerouac, la presentación de la obra, el resumen detallado (capitulo por capitulo), los motivos de su éxito, los temas principales y el analisis del movimiento literario del autor.
'The Sea is My Brother', Jack Kerouac's first novel, is published here in its entirety for the first time. Written in late 1942, the novel was inspired by Jack's experiences of life at sea on board the SS Dorchester, after working the summer as a Merchant Marine. This edition also contains a number of other fragments of Kerouac's early writing and letters between Kerouac and Sebastian Sampas all from the early 1940s.
Pull My Daisy est un court-métrage réalisé en 1959 par Robert Frank et Alfred Leslie, adapté par Jack Kerouac de l'une de ses pièces et interprété entre autres par Allen Ginsberg. Ce livre rassemble le texte improvisé par Kerouac et des clichés du film.
In 1944, Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughs were charged as accessories to murder. One of their friends, Carr, had stabbed another, David Kammerrer, whose sexual advances he'd grown tired of rejecting. Carr, had come to them and confessed; Kerouac helped him get rid of the weapon - neither told the police. For this failing they were arrested.
