Jack Kerouac

"In the spring of 1943, during a stint in the Merchant Marine, twenty-one-year old Jack Kerouac set out to write his first novel. Working diligently day and night to complete it by hand, he titled it The Sea Is My Brother. Now, nearly seventy years later, its long-awaited publication provides fascinating details and insight into the early life and development of an American literary icon. Written seven years before The Town and The City officially...

Jack Duluoz, a French-Canadian boy growing up in the factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts, is haunted throughout his adolescence by Dr. Sax, a cryptic, hipster phantom.

Two ebullient young men are engaged in a passionate search for dharma, or truth. Their major adventure is the pursuit of the Zen way, which takes them climbing into the High Sierras to seek the lesson of solitude, a lesson that has a hard time surviving their forays into the pagan groves of San Francisco's Bohemia with its marathon wine-drinking bouts, poetry jam sessions, experiments in "yabyum," and similar nonascetic pastimes.

This autobiographical

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A lively and revealing investigation into the personal history and creative process of the father of the Beat Generation, a pivotal figure of the fifties counter-cultural revolution whose influence is still being felt all over the world. Includes the 2012 sequel: The beat goes on.