Harper Perennial Modern Classics – Big Sur - Softcover

Kerouac, Jack

3.84

34,809 ratings by Goodreads

9780007204984: Harper Perennial Modern Classics – Big Sur

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007204981 ISBN 13: 9780007204984

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2006

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Review:

‘Big Sur has a swing and a concern with living, a feeling for nature, a self-doubting humour and an awareness of posture which puts it squarely in the powerful tradition of American folk writing. Stunning and vivid.’ Sunday Times

‘In Big Sur, the mirror of the Beat way of life is hammered at and it shatters. The Kerouac hero "cracks up" while doing the things he has always liked best to do.’ New York Times

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

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