Visions of Cody - Softcover

Kerouac, Jack

3.56

4,228 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586091599 ISBN 13: 9780586091593

Publisher: Flamingo, 1995

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Kerouac's classic fictional tribute to Neal Cassady. Many years before its first unabridged publication, 'Visions of Cody' became an underground classic. Written by Kerouac at his creative zenith, the book is a celebration of the life of Neal Cassady, his great friend and inspiration. Appearing here as Cody Pomeray, Cassady was also immortalised as Dean Moriarty in 'On the Road'. The son of a drunken Denver drop-out, brought up homeless and motherless during the Depression, Cassady lived his life raw -- hustling in pool halls, stealing cars for marathon joy rides across the States, living wild and penniless amongst society's misfits and outcasts. He left a sizzling reputation in his wake, becoming the insane Beat Demon of San Francisco. Through him Kerouac created one of the few lasting heroes of 20th-century literature and established himself in the great tradition of American letters.

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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:

'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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