Jack Kerouac Ebook Collection [KirkLazarus]

On the Road
The most famous of Jack Kerouac's works, is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers, and fellow travelers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of Kerouac's alter-egos, On the Road is a cross-country bohemian odyssey that not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication but penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture.

The Dharma Bums
First published in 1958, a year after On the Road had put the Beat generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouac's most powerful, influential, and bestselling novels. The story focuses on two untrammeled young Americans mountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writer whose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Francisco's Bohemia to solitude and mountain climbing in the High Sierras to Ray's sixty-day vigil by himself atop Desolation Peak in Washington State. Primary to this evocative and soulful novel is an honest, exuberant search for an affirmative way of life in the midst of the atomic age. In many ways, The Dharma Bums also presaged the environmental, back-to-the-land, and American Buddhist movements of the 1960s and beyond.

Big Sur
Big Sur is a 1962 novel by Jack Kerouac. It recounts the events surrounding Kerouac's (here known by the name of his fictional alter-ego Jack Duluoz) three brief sojourns to a cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur, owned by Kerouac's friend and Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The novel departs from Kerouac's previous fictionalized autobiographical series in that the character Duluoz is shown as a popular, published author; Kerouac's previous novels are restricted to depicting Kerouac's days as a bohemian traveller.
The novel depicts Duluoz's mental and physical deterioration. Duluoz is unable to cope with a suddenly demanding public, and is battling with advanced alcoholism. He seeks respite first in solitude in the Big Sur cabin, then in a relationship with Billie, the mistress of his longtime friend Cody Pomeray (Neal Cassady). Duluoz finds respite in the Big Sur wilderness, but is driven by loneliness to return to the city, and resumes drinking heavily.
Across Duluoz's subsequent trips to Big Sur and interleaved lifestyle in San Francisco, he drunkenly embarrasses Cody by introducing Billie to Cody's wife, cannot emotionally provide for the increasingly demanding Billie, and finds himself increasingly unable to integrate into suburban life. Duluoz's inner turmoil culminates in his nervous breakdown during his third journey to Big Sur.

Mexico City Blues
Jack Kerouac, who died in 1969 at the age of forty-seven, is renowned as the father of the "beat generation." His eighteen internationally acclaimed books -- including "On the Road, Doctor Sax, The Dharma Bums, " and "The Sea is My Brother" -- were important signpost in a new American literature. Here, in "Mexico City Blues, " his only collection of poetry, his voice is as distinctive as in his prose; it roams widely across continents and cultures in a restless search for meaning and expression, giving the verse the unique qualities found in America's most distinctive contribution to music.

The Sea is My Brother
In the spring of 1943, during a stint in the Merchant Marine, 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. Now, nearly seventy years later, its long-awaited publication provides fascinating details and insight into the early life and development of an American literary icon.
Written seven years before The Town and The City officially launched his writing career, The Sea Is My Brother marks a pivotal point in which Kerouac began laying the foundations for his pioneering method and signature style. 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 bears all the hallmarks of classic Kerouac: the search for spiritual meaning in a materialistic world, spontaneous travel as the true road to freedom, late nights in bars and apartments engaged in intense conversation, the desperate urge to escape from society, and the strange, terrible beauty of loneliness.

Book of Sketches
In 1952 and 1953 as he wandered around America, Jack Kerouac jotted down spontaneous prose poems, or “sketches” as he called them, on small notebooks that he kept in his shirt pockets. The poems recount his travels—New York, North Carolina, Lowell (Massachusetts, Kerouac’s birthplace), San Francisco, Denver, Kansas, Mexico—observations, and meditations on art and life. The poems are often strung together so that over the course of several of them, a little story—or travelogue—appears, complete in itself. Published for the first time, Book of Sketches offers a luminous, intimate, and transcendental glimpse of one of the most original voices of the twentieth century at a key time in his literary and spiritual development.

Dr. Sax
In this haunting novel of intensely felt adolescence, Jack Kerouac tells the story of Jack Duluoz, a French-Canadian boy growing up, as Kerouac himself did, in the dingy factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts. Dr. Sax, with his flowing cape, slouch hat, and insinuating leer, is chief among the many ghosts and demons that populate Jack's fantasy world. Deftly mingling memory and dream, Kerouac captures the accents and texture of his boyhood in Lowell as he relates Jack's adventures with this cryptic, apocalyptic hipster phantom.

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