Desolation Angels - by Jack Kerouac (Paperback)

About the Book

The classic novel from the definitive voice of the Beat Generation, Desolation Angels is the story of Kerouac's life just before the publication of On the Road--as told through his fictional self--Jack Duluoz. As he hitches, walks, and talks his way across the world, Duluoz perceives the angel that is in everything. It is life as he sees it.

Book Synopsis

The classic autobiographical novel, "one of the most true, comic, and grizzly journeys in American literature" (Time), from acclaimed author Jack Kerouac

"If the Pulitzer Prize were given for the book that is most representative of American life, I would nominate Desolation Angels."--Dan Wakefield, The Atlantic

Desolation Angels covers a key year in Jack Kerouac's life--the period that led up to the publication of On the Road in September of 1957. After spending two months in the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington, Kerouac's fictional self Jack Duluoz comes down from the isolated mountains to the wild excitement of the bars, jazz clubs, and parties of San Francisco, before traveling on to Mexico City, New York, Tangiers, Paris, and London. Duluoz attempts to extricate himself from the world but fails, for one must "live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry." Desolation Angels is quintessential Kerouac.

Review Quotes

"If the Pulitzer Prize were given for the book that is most representative of American life, I would nominate Desolation Angels."
--Dan Wakefield, The Atlantic

"One of the most true, comic, and grizzly journeys in American literature."
--Time

"Kerouac was a breath of fresh air when he came on the literary scene. He was also a force, a tragedy, a triumph, and an ongoing influence, and that influence is still with us."
--Norman Mailer

"Kerouac ... defines the sensibilites of members of his own subgeneration: we knew them as wearing such guises as the Beat Generation, the Subterraneans, the Dharma Bums; now we see them as Desolation Angels, sadly pursuing their empty futilities..."
--Nelson Algren

"Each book by Kerouac is unique, a telepathic discord. Such rich natural writing is nonpareil in later 20th century, a synthesis of Proust, Celine, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Genet, Thelonius Monk, Basho, Charlie Parker and Kerouac's own athletic sacred insight. Jack Kerouac was a 'writer' as his great peer William S. Burroughs says."
--Allen Ginsberg

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.