Maggie Cassidy (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Kerouac, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141190035 ISBN 13: 9780141190037

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2009

Synopsis

From the bard of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac's Maggie Cassidy is an autobiographical novel of young love, published in Penguin Modern Classics.

Though publishers stopped Maggie Cassidy's Jack Duluoz and On the Road's Sal Paradise from sharing the same name, Kerouac meant the books to be two parts of the same life. While On the Road made Paradise (and Kerouac) a hero for generations to come of the disaffected and restless, Maggie Cassidy is an affectionate portrait of the teenager that made the man - of friendship and first love growing up in a New England mill town. Duluoz is a high school athletics and football star who meets Maggie Cassidy and begins a devoted, inconstant, tender adolescent love affair. It is one of the most sustained, poetic pieces of Kerouac's 'spontaneous prose'.

Jack Kerouac (1922-69) was an American novelist, poet, artist and part of the Beat Generation. His first published novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957, that made Kerouac famous. Publication of his many other books followed, among them The Subterraneans, Big Sur, and The Dharma Bums. Kerouac died in Florida at the age of forty-seven.

If you enjoyed Maggie Cassidy, you might like Kerouac's The Subterraneans and Pic, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'A very unique cat - a French Canadian Hinayana Buddhist Beat Catholic savant' Allen Ginsberg

About this title

About the Author:

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. In 1947, enthused by bebop, the rebel attitude of his friend Neal Cassady, and the throng of hobos, drug addicts and hustlers he encountered in New York, he decided to discover America and hitchhike across the country. His writing was openly autobiographical and he developed a style he referred to as 'spontaneous prose' which he used to record the experiences of the Beat Generation. Kerouac wrote a number of hugely influential and popular novels - most famously the international best-seller On the Road. Among his many other novels are Visions of Cody, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums and Big Sur. As much as anything, he came to represent a philosophy, a way of life. He died in 1969.

Synopsis:

Moodily atmospheric, full of verve and energy, "Maggie Cassidy" is Kerouac's poignant tale of teenage romance in New England. The story of Jack and Maggie, in love with the idea of being in love, looking ahead to marriage with hope and trepidation, is told with touching simplicity. It skillfully captures both the intensity and the ordinariness of adolescent life, with its torments and complications and is a beautiful evocation of growing up in America.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0141190035
• ISBN 13: 9780141190037
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192