From the most famous of the Beat writers and the author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Kerouac's intoxicating love story of two young bohemians, now reissued in the centenary year of his birth
Written over the course of three days and three nights, The Subterraneans was generated out of the same kind of ecstatic flash of inspiration that produced another one of Kerouac's early classics, On the Road. Centering around the tempestuous romance and breakup of Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox--two denizens of the 1950s San Francisco underground--The Subterraneans is a tale of dark alleys and smoky rooms, of artists, visionaries, and adventurers existing outside mainstream America's field of vision. Loosely based on Kerouac's own life, and peopled with analogues of real-life friends, including William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady, The Subterraneans is a vivid and breathless masterwork of Beat literature.
“Praise for Jack Kerouac and The Subterraneans : "Kerouac's work represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation."-- Ann Douglas "A book of raw power and awesome beauty."-- San Francisco Examiner " On the Road is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is . . . A major novel."-- New York Times "Each book by Kerouac is unique, a telepathic discord. Such rich, natural writing is nonpareil in the later twentieth century."-- Allen Ginsberg "An outsider in America, Jack Kerouac was a true original."-- Ann Charters "The way that [ On the Road ] is so enduring--so impervious to shifting cultural winds--seems to indicate something about how successfully it articulates a very American rootlessness . . . A hysterical elegy for threatened male freedom . . . Might be the last great American novel about masculine seduction."-- New Yorker "There is no doubt about [Kerouac's] great sensitivity to language. His sentences frequently move into tempestuous sweeps and whorls and sometimes they have something of the rich music of Gerard Manley Hopkins or Dylan Thomas."-- New York Herald Tribune "The first clear development of the American Romantic prose since Hemingway, Kerouac's writing is full of mad sex, comedy, wide-screen travel writing, and long lyrical evocations of American childhood and adolescent memories."-- Times (UK)”
Praise for Jack Kerouac and The Subterraneans:
"Kerouac's work represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation."--Ann Douglas
"A book of raw power and awesome beauty."--San Francisco Examiner
"On the Road is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat, ' and whose principal avatar he is . . . A major novel."--New York Times
"Each book by Kerouac is unique, a telepathic discord. Such rich, natural writing is nonpareil in the later twentieth century."--Allen Ginsberg
"An outsider in America, Jack Kerouac was a true original."--Ann Charters
"The way that [On the Road] is so enduring--so impervious to shifting cultural winds--seems to indicate something about how successfully it articulates a very American rootlessness . . . A hysterical elegy for threatened male freedom . . . Might be the last great American novel about masculine seduction."--New Yorker
"There is no doubt about [Kerouac's] great sensitivity to language. His sentences frequently move into tempestuous sweeps and whorls and sometimes they have something of the rich music of Gerard Manley Hopkins or Dylan Thomas."--New York Herald Tribune
"The first clear development of the American Romantic prose since Hemingway, Kerouac's writing is full of mad sex, comedy, wide-screen travel writing, and long lyrical evocations of American childhood and adolescent memories."--Times (UK)
JACK KEROUAC was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. He won a scholarship to Columbia University, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. On the Road, published in 1957, epitomized to the world what became known as the "Beat generation" and made Kerouac one of the best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969.
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