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

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

Big Sur

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

The Town and the City

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An anthology of more than sixty previously unpublished early works, written by Kerouac between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one, features a wide range of stories, poems, and an excerpt from his merchant marine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

'Into this book, The Sea is My Brother, I shall weave all the passion and glory of living, its restlessness and peace, its fever and ennui, its mornings, noons and nights of desire, frustration, fear, triumph, and death . . . ' Before he became famous with On the Road, Jack Kerouac was a sailor. This, his first novel, was inspired by his love affair with the sea. It follows the fortunes of Wesley Martin, a taciturn loner who 'loved the sea with a strange, lonely love', and Bill Everhart, a firebrand intellectual who longs for elemental freedoms and the simple life. After a last-minute decision to work their passage on a ship, they find themselves on the S.S. Westminsterin Boston. Bound for Greenland, they argue, drink Scotch, play cards, dodge torpedoes, contemplate the vast isolation of their surroundings, and wonder if they will reach their destination. Kerouac weaves their story into an intense portrait of friendship and brotherhood; an existential meditation on the desire to escape society, and, above all, the rugged, untameable power of the sea. Kerouac began this novel shortly after his first tour as a Merchant Marine in late summer 1942, where he kept a journal detailing the gritty daily routine of life at sea and the character traits of his fellow shipmates. Shortly after his return to shore, he wove these spontaneous observations into a 158-page handwritten manuscript, which was lost during his lifetime. Now published in its entirety, along with fragments of early stories and letters, and commentary illuminating his development as a writer, The Sea is My Brothergives us a unique insight into the young Kerouac and the formation of his genius.

The Lost Novel

The Sea is My Brother

Novel of adolescent love in a New England mill town.

Maggie Cassidy

Presents the story of the self-destruction of a beautiful Aztec prostitute enmeshed in the drug underworld of Mexico City

Tristessa

On the Road

Yolda

Jack Duluoz, a French-Canadian boy growing up in the factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts, is haunted throughout his adolescence by Dr. Sax, a cryptic, hipster phantom.

Faust Part Three

Doctor Sax

Collects 200 letters exchanged by the celebrated Beat movement writers to offer insight into their abiding friendship and artistic views, in a volume that spans the period from Ginsberg's Columbia education until shortly before Kerouac's death.

The Letters

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg

Howard Cunnell

Penny Vlagopoulos

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.

The Original Scroll

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

Pocket Poets Number 48

Pomes All Sizes

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.

Jack Kerouac

About

Books

Join the club