Beginning in the late 1940s, American literature discovered a four-letter word, and the word was "beat." Beat as in poverty and beatitude, ecstacy and exile. Beat was Jack Kerouac touring the American road in prose as fast and reckless as a V-8 Chevy. It
This one-volume omnibus, planned by the author before his death and now completed by his biographer, Ann Charters, makes clear the ambition and accomplishment of Jack Kerouac's "Legend of Duluoz" - the story of his life told in the course of his many "tru
Thirty years after his death, popular and academic interest in the life and work of Jack Kerouac have reached an all-time high. The first volume of his selected letters, edited by renowned biographer and Beat scholar Ann Charters, was widely regarded as a
When Viking published the first volume of Jack Kerouac's letters in 1995, it was considered a major addition to Kerouac scholarship. The early correspondence portended the uninhibited and spontaneous prose style that would later become the author's tradem
Now that Kerouac's major novel, On the Road is accepted as an American classic, academic critics are slowly beginning to catch up with his experimental literary methods and examine the dozen books comprising what he called 'the legend of Duluoz.' Nearly a
Jack Kerouac says:"Old Angel Midnight is only the beginning of a lifelong work in multilingual sound, representing the haddalada-babra of babbling world tongues coming in thru my window at midnight no matter where I live or what I'm doing, in Mexico, Moro
A literary time capsule from the decade that changed the world
From civil rights to free love, JFK to LSD, Woodstock to the Moonwalk, the Sixties was a time of change, political unrest, and radical experiments in the arts, sexuality, and personal ident
A methedrine-inspired odyssey, a painfully candid exploration of the horizons of the speed freak's world, from the drug-hazed fantasy of New York's infamous East Village to the terrifying reality of a Federal narcotics hospital, Burroughs Jr.'s two novels
Literature is a conversation — between writers and other writers, and between writers and readers. In Literature and Its Writers, Ann and Samuel Charters complement a rich and varied selection of stories, poems, and plays with an unparalleled array of
