Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

Kerouac, Jack

ISBN 10: 0143036068 ISBN 13: 9780143036067

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 2006

Synopsis

Selections from Jack Kerouac’s journals of the late 1940s and early 1950s—the raw material for what became his classic novel On the Road, edited and with an introduction by Douglas Brinkley

“A story of self-invention, perseverance, and breakthrough . . . What Kerouac wanted most, these journals reveal, was to dig down into the dark American earth . . . and turn up his own rich shovelful of truth.”—The New York Times Book Review

“These Kerouac journals remind me of a time, not all that long ago, when there were still a few people passionately responsive to writing. They are now extinct.”—Kurt Vonnegut

Jack Kerouac is best known through the image he put forth in his autobiographical novels. Yet it is only his private journals, in which he set down the raw material of his life and thinking, that reveal to us the real Kerouac. In Windblown World, distinguished Americanist Douglas Brinkley has gathered a selection of journal entries from the most pivotal period of Kerouac’s life, 1947 to 1954. Here is Kerouac as a hungry young writer finishing his first novel while forging crucial friendships with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady.
 
Truly a self-portrait of the artist as a young man, this unique and indispensable volume is an integral element of the Beat oeuvre.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0143036068
• ISBN 13: 9780143036067
• Binding: Diary
• Number of pages: 480