My bookshelf·Index Author

Jack Kerouac

3 books

No. 0011 Fiction · California

Big Sur

Jack Kerouac

Kerouac wrote On the Road, and it made him famous, and the fame ate him alive. By 1960, he was 38, drinking himself apart, with strangers showing up at his mother’s house wanting the King of the Beats. Ferlinghetti offered…

Read the entry
Big Sur
No. 0016 Fiction · California

Dharma Bums

Jack Kerouac

Kerouac wrote this right after On the Road, and it’s the calmer and better book. Ray Smith is Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder is Gary Snyder, who was then a young poet in Berkeley translating Han Shan and heading for a…

Read the entry
Dharma Bums
No. 0010 Fiction · American Southwest

On the Road

Jack Kerouac

Sal Paradise meets Dean Moriarty and spends the next few years crossing and recrossing the country — New York to Denver to San Francisco, down to Mexico City, back again, in borrowed cars and on buses, with no money, chasing…

Read the entry
On the Road