The Portable Jack Kerouac

This definitive Kerouac collection—the only anthology of his work ever published—is an essential introduction to one of the country’s most influential writers.

“Kerouac’s work represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
This one-volume omnibus, planned by Kerouac himself before his death and completed by his biographer, Ann Charters, makes clear the ambition and accomplishment of Jack Kerouac’s “Legend of Duluoz”—the story of his life told in the course of his many “true-story novels.” As Kerouac once wrote, “The whole thing forms one enormous comedy, seen through the eyes of poor Ti Jean (me), otherwise known as Jack Duluoz, the world of raging action and folly and also of gentle sweetness seen through the keyhole of his eye.”
 
This compilation presents selections from the “Legend of Duluoz” novels, in chronological order, from Dr. Sax to On the Road to Big Sur, and also includes poetry, letters, and essays on Buddhism, writing, and the Beat Generation. The Portable Jack Kerouac offers a total immersion in the mind of an American master.
 
Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

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.

Ann Charters is the editor of The Portable Sixties Reader, The Portable Jack Kerouac, two volumes of Jack Kerouac's Selected Letters, and Beat Down to Your Soul. She teaches at the University of Connecticut.