Why Kerouac Matters

Author : John Leland
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2007-08-16
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781101202654

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Why Kerouac Matters by John Leland Pdf

Legions of youthful Americans have taken On the Road as a manifesto for rebellion and an inspiration to hit the road. But there is much more to the book than that. In Why Kerouac Matters, John Leland embarks on a wry, insightful, and playful discussion of the novel, arguing that it still matters because it lays out an alternative road map to growing up. Along the way, Leland overturns many misconceptions about On the Road as he examines the lessons that Kerouac's alter ego, Sal Paradise, absorbs and dispenses on his novelistic journey to manhood, and how those lessons-about work and money, love and sex, art and holiness - still reverberate today.

Author : John Leland
Publisher : Sarah Crichton Books
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2018-01-23
Category : Self-Help
ISBN : 9780374717056

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Happiness Is a Choice You Make by John Leland Pdf

A New York Times Bestseller! An extraordinary look at what it means to grow old and a heartening guide to well-being, Happiness Is a Choice You Make weaves together the stories and wisdom of six New Yorkers who number among the “oldest old”— those eighty-five and up. In 2015, when the award-winning journalist John Leland set out on behalf of The New York Times to meet members of America’s fastest-growing age group, he anticipated learning of challenges, of loneliness, and of the deterioration of body, mind, and quality of life. But the elders he met took him in an entirely different direction. Despite disparate backgrounds and circumstances, they each lived with a surprising lightness and contentment. The reality Leland encountered upended contemporary notions of aging, revealing the late stages of life as unexpectedly rich and the elderly as incomparably wise. Happiness Is a Choice You Make is an enduring collection of lessons that emphasizes, above all, the extraordinary influence we wield over the quality of our lives. With humility, heart, and wit, Leland has crafted a sophisticated and necessary reflection on how to “live better”—informed by those who have mastered the art.

Author : Carolyn Cassady
Publisher : Abrams
Page : 470 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2008-10-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781468305715

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Off the Road by Carolyn Cassady Pdf

This memoir by the woman at the center of the Beat movement is “a great book as well as a wonderful autobiography” (The Washington Post Book World). Written by the woman who loved them all—as wife of Cassady, lover of Kerouac, and friend of Ginsberg—this riveting and intimate memoir spans one of the most vital eras in twentieth-century literature and culture, including the explosive successes of Kerouac’s On the Road and Ginsberg’s Howl, the flowering of the Beat movement, and the social revolution of the 1960s. Artist, writer, and designer Carolyn Cassady reveals a side of Neal Cassady rarely seen—that of husband and father, a man who craved respectability, yet could not resist the thrills of a wilder, and ultimately more destructive, lifestyle. “To the familiar history of the Beat generation, Carolyn Cassady adds a proprietary chapter marked with newness, self-exposure, love and poignancy.” —Publishers Weekly “Rich with gossip, historically significant photographs, intimate memories, [and] unpublished letters.” —The New York Times “A poignant recollection—truthful, coarse, and inviting—teeming with the spirit of the men who inspired and symbolized the dreams of a generation.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Author : Ellis Amburn
Publisher : St. Martin's Griffin
Page : 778 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 1999-11-29
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781466821316

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Subterranean Kerouac by Ellis Amburn Pdf

Drawing upon original interviews and his own relationship with Kerouac, Ellis Amburn reveals an inner man who has not appeared in any previous biography-a man torn by his conflicting desires and beliefs. Subterranean Kerouac has been singled out as one of the most significant biographies to appear in years, and it shows how Kerouac struggled throughout his life with poverty, alcoholism, and his doubts about his own lifestyle of substance abuse, indolence, and promiscuity.

Author : Simon Warner,Jim Sampas
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 480 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2018-03-08
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781501323379

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Kerouac on Record by Simon Warner,Jim Sampas Pdf

He was the leading light of the Beat Generation writers and the most dynamic author of his time, but Jack Kerouac also had a lifelong passion for music, particularly the mid-century jazz of New York City, the development of which he witnessed first-hand during the 1940s with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk to the fore. The novelist, most famous for his 1957 book On the Road, admired the sounds of bebop and attempted to bring something of their original energy to his own writing, a torrent of semi-autobiographical stories he published between 1950 and his early death in 1969. Yet he was also drawn to American popular music of all kinds – from the blues to Broadway ballads – and when he came to record albums under his own name, he married his unique spoken word style with some of the most talented musicians on the scene. Kerouac's musical legacy goes well beyond the studio recordings he made himself: his influence infused generations of music makers who followed in his work – from singer-songwriters to rock bands. Some of the greatest transatlantic names – Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, Van Morrison and David Bowie, Janis Joplin and Tom Waits, Sonic Youth and Death Cab for Cutie, and many more – credited Kerouac's impact on their output. In Kerouac on Record, we consider how the writer brought his passion for jazz to his prose and poetry, his own record releases, the ways his legacy has been sustained by numerous more recent talents, those rock tributes that have kept his memory alive and some of the scores that have featured in Hollywood adaptations of the adventures he brought to the printed page.

Author : Ian Cutler
Publisher : Feral House
Page : 355 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2019-05-14
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781627310895

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Jim Christy: A Vagabond Life by Ian Cutler Pdf

Jim Christy’s life and adventures began on the mobbed-up streets of South Philadelphia. Over his 73 years to date, Christy has asserted his freedom of spirit as a vagabond adventurer, latter-day hobo, journalist, private eye, actor, musician, and artist, in over 50 countries around the globe, and still found time to write over 30 books. His early adventures as a street fighter and child tramp provide a unique socio-cultural history of Philadelphia in the 50’s and 60’s before the book moves on to recount his later exploits from some of the most remote and random corners of the world.

Author : Martin A. Lee
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 529 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2013-08-13
Category : Health & Fitness
ISBN : 9781439102619

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Smoke Signals by Martin A. Lee Pdf

In this book the author, an investigative journalist, traces the social history of marijuana from its origins to its emergence in the 1960s as a defining force in an ongoing culture war. He describes how the illicit marijuana subculture overcame government opposition and morphed into a multibillion-dollar industry. In 1996, Californians voted to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes. Similar laws have followed in several other states, but not without antagonistic responses from federal, state, and local law enforcement. The author draws attention to underreported scientific breakthroughs that are reshaping the therapeutic landscape: medical researchers have developed promising treatments for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, chronic pain, and many other conditions that are beyond the reach of conventional cures. This book is an examination of the medical, recreational, scientific, and economic dimensions of the world's most controversial plant.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : PediaPress
Page : 143 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2024-07-01
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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The Beat Generation by Anonim Pdf

Author : Jack Kerouac
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 1994-06-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781101548431

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Vanity of Duluoz by Jack Kerouac Pdf

Written in 1967 from the vantage point of the psychedelic sixties, Vanity of Duluoz is a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young man Originally subtitled "An Adventurous Education, 1935-1946," Vanity of Duluoz presents the formative years in the life of Jack Duluoz—Kerouac's alter ego—beginning with his high school experiences as a sporting jock in small-town New England and his time at Columbia University on a football scholarship. Just as Jack's glamorous new adult life begins, so does World War II, and he joins the US Navy to travel the world. The more he experiences, the more he realizes the limits of his former plans, and decides to and return to New York, where he collides with the start of the Beat movement, and a riot of drugs, sex and writing. Vanity of Duluoz was Kerouac's final work published before his death in 1969.

Author : Jack Kerouac
Publisher : Da Capo Press
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2013-03-26
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780306822476

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The Sea Is My Brother by Jack Kerouac Pdf

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.

Author : Jack Kerouac
Publisher : Open Road Media
Page : 40 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2016-03-22
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9781504033992

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The Scripture of the Golden Eternity by Jack Kerouac Pdf

Poetic meditations on joy, consciousness, and becoming one with the infinite universe from the author of On the Road During an unexplained fainting spell, Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac experienced a flash of enlightenment. A student of Buddhist philosophy, Kerouac recognized the experience as “satori,” a moment of life-changing epiphany. The knowledge he gained in that instant is expressed in this volume of sixty-six prose poems with language that is both precise and cryptic, mystical and plain. His vision proclaims, “There are not two of us here, reader and writer, but one golden eternity.” Within these meditations, haikus, and Zen koans is a contemplation of consciousness and impermanence. While heavily influenced by the form of Buddhist poems or sutras, Kerouac also draws inspiration from a variety of religious traditions, including Taoism, Native American spirituality, and the Catholicism of his youth. Far-reaching and inclusive, this collection reveals the breadth of Kerouac’s poetic sensibility and the curiosity, word play, and fierce desire to understand the nature of existence that make up the foundational concepts of Beat poetry and propel all of Kerouac’s writing.

Author : Ronald K. L. Collins,David M. Skover
Publisher : Top Five Books LLC
Page : 484 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2013-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781938938030

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Mania by Ronald K. L. Collins,David M. Skover Pdf

By the time Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer to death on the banks of the Hudson River in August 1944, it was clear that the hard-partying teenage companion to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs might need to reevaluate his life. A two-year stint in a reformatory straightened out the wayward youth but did little to curb the wild ways of his friends. MANIA tells the story of this remarkable group—who strained against the conformity of postwar America, who experimented with drink, drugs, sex, jazz, and literature, and who yearned to be heard, to remake art and society in their own libertine image. What is more remarkable than the manic lives they led is that they succeeded—remaking their own generation and inspiring the ones that followed. From the breakthrough success of Kerouac's On the Road to the controversy of Ginsberg's Howl and Burroughs' Naked Lunch, the counterculture was about to go mainstream for the first time, and America would never be the same again. Based on more than eight years’ writing and research, Ronald Collins and David Skover—authors of the highly acclaimed The Trials of Lenny Bruce—bring the stories of these artists, hipsters, hustlers, and maniacs to life in a dramatic, fast-paced, and often darkly comic narrative.

Author : Jack Kerouac
Publisher : McClelland & Stewart
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2020-01-28
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780735254251

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Big Sur by Jack Kerouac Pdf

Driven mad by three years of endless telegrams, phone calls, mail, and reporters in the wake of the success of On the Road, Jack Kerouac needed peace, quiet, sobriety, and solitude, so he withdrew to a cabin in Big Sur on the Californian coast. Amid the wild beauty of the landscape, Kerouac struggled to come to terms with his own myth and its malign impact on his life. The result is Big Sur, a moving, gritty, and uninhibited autobiographical account of a man struggling with inner demons, blessed by talent and cursed with an urge towards self-destruction—a path lined with bourbon, Manhattans, and scotch. Searingly honest and raw, Big Sur shows a man coming to terms with fame, himself, and the world. Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.

Author : Paul Maher
Publisher : Da Capo Press, Incorporated
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2007-11-02
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : UOM:39015073905583

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Jack Kerouac's American Journey by Paul Maher Pdf

A Kerouac scholar traces the true adventures behind the twentieth century classic novel and discusses the real-life inspirations for the novel's memorable characters.

Author : Jack Kerouac
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 1995-09-01
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9781101548806

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Book of Blues by Jack Kerouac Pdf

Best known for his "Legend of Duluoz" novels, including On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In these eight extended poems, Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues form that he used to fullest effect in Mexico City Blues, his largely unheralded classic of postmodern literature. Edited by Kerouac himself, Book of Blues is an exuberant foray into language and consciousness, rich with imagery, propelled by rythm, and based in a reverent attentiveness to the moment. "In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to the other, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musicians spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of time as it waves & waves on by in measured choruses." —Jack Kerouac