Visions of Cody - Softcover

Kerouac, Jack

3.56

4,228 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0070342385 ISBN 13: 9780070342385

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies, 1990

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"What I'm beginning to discover now is something beyond the novel and beyond the arbitrary confines of the story. . . . I'm making myself seek to find the wild form, that can grow with my wild heart . . . because now I know MY HEART DOES GROW." —Jack Kerouac, in a letter to John Clellon Holmes

Written in 1951-52, Visions of Cody was an underground legend by the time it was finally published in 1972. Writing in a radical, experimental form ("the New Journalism fifteen years early," as Dennis McNally noted in Desolate Angel), Kerouac created the ultimate account of his voyages with Neal Cassady during the late forties, which he captured in different form in On the Road. Here are the members of the Beat Generatoin as they were in the years before any label had been affixed to them. Here is the postwar America that Kerouac knew so well and celebrated so magnificently. His ecstatic sense of superabundant reality is informed by the knowledge of mortality: "I'm writing this book because we're all going to die. . . . My heart broke in the general despair and opened up inward to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream."

"The most sincere and holy writing I know of our age." —Allen Ginsberg

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About the Author:

Jack Kerouac(1922-1969), the central figure of the Beat Generation, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922 and died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969. Among his many novels are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Visions of Cody.

Review:

'His most ambitious novel. An opportunity to sample the tenderness, richness and vibrancy of his writing.' New Statesman 'It is easy enough for us now to read the distress of America in the movies and novels of the Fifties, to see the panic and disarray behind the cosy fictions. But Kerouac read it then, when the Fifties had scarcely started. His best work is always elegiac, a mourning for something vanished before it has even properly arrived.' New Society '"Visions of Cody" recreates Cody's world in a series of epiphanies, all recorded with the expansive lyricism of a Whitman whose America has reached the end of the road. It is at once an epitaph and a rhapsodic celebration of the American Beat world.' TLS

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