Desolation Angels - Softcover

Kerouac, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586089071 ISBN 13: 9780586089071

Publisher: Flamingo, 1995

Synopsis

Desolation Angels, published in 1965, yet written years earlier around the time On the Road was in the process of publication, is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac, which makes up part of his Duluoz Legend. According to the book's foreword, the opening section of the novel is almost directly taken from the journal he kept when he was a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade mountains of Washington state. Much of the psychological struggle which the novel's protagonist, Jack Duluoz, undergoes in the novel reflects Kerouac's own increasing disenchantment with the Buddhist philosophy with which he had previously been fascinated.

About this title

About the Author

Jack Kerouac was born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the youngest of three children in a French-Canadian family. Having left college, he joined the merchant marines and began the restless wanderings that were to continue for the greater part of his life. His first novel, The Town and the City, was published in 1950. On the Road, although written in 1951 (in a few hectic days on a scroll of newsprint), was not published until 1957 -- it made him one of the most controversial and best-known writers of his time. Publication of his many other books, among them The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax and Desolation Angels, followed. Jack Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida at the age of forty-seven.

Review

'One of the most true, comic and grizzly journeys in American literature.' Time 'The Beats drug, hop freight trains, live on the road and contemplate Buddha. A nerve-jangling, sometimes sentimental, always sincere and funny book.' Sunday Times 'A beatific glow turns Ginsberg into a great poet, not a hairy rhymester selling his Vaseline jars as fake holy relics. Burroughs becomes an all-American folk hero, swinging and swaggering down the Calle Larache, rebuking his companions for walking too slow. All in a prose-poetry out of Whitman and Wolfe and Dylan Thomas.' Observer

Edition details

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0586089071
• ISBN 13: 9780586089071
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 397