Los Angeles has always been a place of paradisal promise and apocalyptic undercurrents. Simone de Beauvoir saw a kaleidoscopic "hall of mirrors," Aldous Huxley a "city of dreadful joy." Jack Kerouac found a "huge desert encampment," David Thomson imagined
In 1951, it was suggested to Jack Kerouac by his friend Ed White that he "sketch in the streets like a painter but with words." In August of the following year, Kerouac began writing down prose poem "sketches" in small notebooks that he kept in the breast
This one-volume omnibus, planned by the author before his death and now completed by his biographer, Ann Charters, makes clear the ambition and accomplishment of Jack Kerouac's "Legend of Duluoz" - the story of his life told in the course of his many "tru
Donald Allen, the late great editor of the Evergreen Review at Grove Press and editor of the seminal anthology The New American Poetry, first met Jack Kerouac in 1956 when he and Allen Ginsberg came to visit at his West Village apartment. At the time, All
These classic Kerouac meditations, zen koans, and prose poems express the poet’s beatific quest for peace and joy through oneness with the universe."The Scripture of the Golden Eternity is fueled by Kerouac's discerning meditation on the nature of imper
On a blind date in Greenwich Village set up by Allen Ginsberg, Joyce Johnson (then Joyce Glassman) met Jack Kerouac in January 1957, nine months before he became famous overnight with the publication of On the Road. She was an adventurous, independent-min
"His life...ended when he was nine and the nuns of St. Louis de France Parochial School were at his bedside to take down his dying words because they'd heard his astonishing revelations of heaven delivered in catechism on no more encouragement than it was
"In the Book of Dreams I just continue the same story but in the dreams I had of the real-life characters I always write about."Excerpt:WALKING THROUGH SLUM SUBURBS of Mexico City I'm stopped by smiling threesome of cats who've disengaged themselves from
Tristessa is the name with which Kerouac baptized Esperanza Villanueva, a Catholic Mexican young woman, a prostitute and addict to certain drugs, whom he fell in love with during one of his stays in Mexico -a country that he frequently visited - by the mi
