Book of Sketches (Penguin Poets) - Softcover

Kerouac, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0142002151 ISBN 13: 9780142002155

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2006

Synopsis

A luminous, intimate, and transcendental glimpse into the mind of Jack Kerouac, one of the most original voices of the twentieth century
 
“Sketching . . . Everything activates in front of you in myriad profusion, you just have to purify your mind and let it pour the words and write with 100% personal honesty.”
 
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 pockets of his shirts. For two years he recorded travels, observations, and meditations on art and life as he moved across America and down to Mexico and back. The poems are often strung together so that over the course of several of them, a little story—or travelogue—appears, complete in itself.
 
In 1957, Kerouac sat down with the fifteen handwritten sketch notebooks he had accumulated and typed them into a manuscript called Book of Sketches. Published for the first time, this work offers a detailed portrait of Kerouac at a key period of his literary career.

About this title

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.

George Condo is a painter and sculptor who has exhibited extensively in both the United States and Europe. He has received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Reviews

Starred Review. Somewhere between diary, verbal sketchbook and play-by-play account of whatever passed before his eyes, this collection of poems transcribed from notebooks Kerouac kept in his pocket between 1952 and 1954 turns out to rank with his most interesting work. From clipped descriptions of America's underbelly ("a pile of junk, —& the/ girders of the viaduct have / great black bolt heads/ like knobs of a / sweating steel black/ city") to vague hipster prophesying ("The next great con-/ flict will be between/ Hip & Christ"), Whitmanesque embraces of his fellow man ("...I have cared/ for ye dutchmen"), love notes to famous beatnik friends ("O Allen Sad Allen Ah / Mystery") and sad, self-deprecating prayers ("Drink is good for/ love — good for/ music — let it/ be good for writing"), Kerouac hits all the notes for which he and his fellow beats are known. While not everything here is golden, the immediacy and unpretentiousness of this off-the-cuff writing makes it an intimate glimpse into the consciousness of a man who simply couldn't stop observing. A short, aggrandizing introduction by painter George Condo sets the tone. (Apr.)
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Kerouac admirers know of the legendary writer's habit of carrying a small notebook in his shirt pocket to jot down his impressions. But it is not common knowledge that this peripatetic observer typed up the contents of the journals he filled from mid-1952 through 1954 to create a manuscript he titled Book of Sketches. This collection of in-the-moment jottings, the literary equivalent of rapidly executed drawings, is now published for the first time. Whitmanesque in his embrace of life, painterly in his details, and enthralled by the texture of language, Kerouac describes the "longroar of sea," hitchhiking in North Carolina, and finding himself naked among trees in Mexico, suffering "the terrible benzedrine / depression after big / night of drinking." He remembers "childhood dreams," wishes for a woman, marvels over the unexpected beauty of a Denver barbershop, and frets over "TV stupidities" and "Americans / who only think in / terms of paranoia & oil." Restless, receptive, and hungry for divinity, Kerouac continues to feed our collective imagination in yet another treasure from his precious archives. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0142002151
• ISBN 13: 9780142002155
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432