Big Sur - by Jack Kerouac (Paperback)

About the Book

In a thinly veiled autobiographical account of his time in Big Sur at the cabin of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and with friends in San Francisco, Kerouac chronicles a ruinous alcoholic bender with searing psychological candor.

Book Synopsis

Five years after On the Road, the book that made him an overnight celebrity, Kerouac examines with wrenching clarity his unwished for fame, escalating alcoholism, and troubling alienation from nature. In a thinly veiled autobiographical account of his time in Big Sur at the cabin of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and with friends in San Francisco--among them fellow iconoclasts Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder, and Alan Watts--he chronicles a ruinous alcoholic bender with searing psychological candor. Kerouac displays full mastery of pace, structure, and idiom in Big Sur--a tale that ends with a crescendo as finely wrought and poignant as any in American literature. Includes a character key and a detailed biographical timeline.

Review Quotes

"Certainly 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

"Kerouac's masterpiece, and one of the great, great works
of the English language."--Richard Meltzer

"A humane, precise account of the extraordinary ravages of alcohol delirium tremens on Kerouac, a superior novelist who had strength to complete his poetic narrative, a task few scribes so afflicted have accomplished. . . . Here at the peak of his suffering humorous genius he wrote through his misery to end with 'Sea, ' a brilliant poem."--Allen Ginsberg