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Ray Smith is a coast-to-coast, freight-hopping poet and drifter, at odds with urban life and middle-class existence (‘all that dumb white machinery in the kitchen’). He meets a kindred spirit in Japhy Rider, a Buddhist drop-out, who enlists Ray into a regime of crazy, purifying hikes up the peaks of the High Sierra and non-stop Zen Free Love Lunacy orgies. ‘Two dissimilar monks on the one path’, their haphazard, often hilarious search for the contentment of ‘dharma’, Buddhism’s all-pervading, supreme principle of life, is pure Kerouac.
'The Dharma Bums'‘ cry for a ‘great rucksack revolution’ in which the country’s youth would cast off the everyday, take to the open road and live the Buddhist way, inspired a whole generation of post-war Americans to search for spiritual knowledge and self-transcendence.
“The Beat Generation now looks quaint to today’s loose freaks who take for granted stances that the rebels of the Fifties only strained toward. But if the Beat lifestyle and attitudes were essentially crude experiments leading to the cultural revolution of the Sixties, it’s still certain that what sparse literature the counter-culture has produced sings nowhere as vibrant, strong and original as in Kerouac.”
ROLLING STONE
“Kerouac’s energy is contagious, his compassion and concern are the genuine homespun article.”
GUARDIAN
Many of Kerouac’s books are available in Flamingo, including 'Big Sur', 'Lonesome Traveler' and 'Vanity of Duluoz'.
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