Maggie Cassidy - by Jack Kerouac (Paperback)

About the Book

Written in 1953, published in 1959 (after the 1957 publication of Kerouac's On the Road made him famous overnight) and long out of print, this touching novel of adolescent love in a New England mill town is one of Kerouac's most accessible works.

Book Synopsis

From the bard of the Beat Generation comes a profoundly moving, autobiographical novel of childhood and first love.

"A surprisingly simple and appealing tale of a young student's fumbling search for love among the high school set . . . at his best, [Kerouac] can give you poetic visions of the commonplace."--The New York Times Book Review

"She'd cradle my broken head in her all-healing lap that beat like a heart; my eyes hot would feel the soothe fingertips of cool, the joy, the stroke and barely-touch, the feminine sweet loss bemused inward-biting far-thinking deep earth river-mad April caress . . ."

This touching novel of adolescent love and loss in a 1930s New England mill town is one of Kerouac's most poignant works. It tells the story of teenager Jack Duluoz, exploring his secret passions, his sporting prowess, and his first romance, with a beautiful Irish girl named Maggie Cassidy.

Originally written in 1953, Maggie Cassidy is a remarkable, bittersweet evocation of the awkwardness and joy of growing up in America.

Review Quotes

Praise for Maggie Cassidy

"A bittersweet evocation of love, lust, and loss in small-town thirties America." --Ann Charters

"When someone asks 'Where does [Kerouac] get that stuff?' say: 'From you!' He lay awake all night listening with eyes and ears. A night of a thousand years. Heard it in the womb, heard it in the cradle, heard it in school, heard it on the floor of life's stock exchange where dreams are traded for gold." --Henry Miller

About the Author

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the "Beat generation" and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of "one vast book," The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.