Big Sur: Jack Kerouac - Softcover

Kerouac, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140168125 ISBN 13: 9780140168129

Publisher: Penguin, 1992

Synopsis

A poignant masterpiece of wrenching personal expression from the author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums

In this 1962 novel, Kerouac's alter ego Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of balance. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, Big Sur "reveals consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion."

About this title

Review:

"In many ways, particularly in the lyrical immediacy that is his distinctive glory, this is Kerouac's best book . . . certainly, he has never displayed more 'gentle sweetness.'"
--San Francisco Chronicle

"Kerouac's grittiest novel to date and the one which will be read with most respect by those skeptical of all the Beat business in the first place."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Big Sur is so devastatingly honest and painful and yet so beautifully written....He was sharing his pain and suffering with the reader in the same way Dostoyevsky did, with the idea of salvation through suffering."
--David Amram

From the Back Cover:

'It's the first trip I've taken away from the home since the publication of On the Road, the book that "made me famous" and in fact so much so I've been driven mad for three years by endless telegrams, phone calls, requests, mail, visitors, reporters, snoopers... Me drunk practically all the time to put on a jovial cap to keep up with all this but finally realising I was surrounded and outnumbered and had to get away to solitude again or die...'

Written as the 'King of the Beats' was approaching middle-age, Big Sur reflects his struggle to come to terms with his own myth. The magnificent and moving novel of a man blessed by great talent and cursed with an urge towards self-destruction, Big Sur is at once Kerouac's toughest and his most humane work.

'In Big Sur, the mirror of the Beat way of life is hammered at and it shatters. The Kerouac hero 'cracks up' under the ministrations of his best friends, loved by his most devoted mistress, and while doing the things he has always liked best to do. It is a bitter iron and the force of it produces what is certainly Kerouac's grittiest novel.'
NEW YORK TIMES

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0140168125
• ISBN 13: 9780140168129
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256