Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road by Isaac Gewirtz Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road traces Kerouac's tumultuous and often traumatic journey from his working-class boyhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, to New York City, where he, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs would become the fathers of the Beat movement, and beyond. Drawing on journals, diaries, manuscripts, and typescripts in the Jack Kerouac Archive of The New York Public Library's Berg Collection of English and American Literature--material never before seen by the general public, and only a very few items of which have been seen even by scholars. Beatific Soul explores Kerouac's evolution as a writer and his spiritual passage from Christianity to Buddhism and back again. Although Kerouac claimed to have written On the Road in the three weeks it took him to type the famous scroll, the text of the published novel emerged, in fact, from a lengthy creative process, which here receives detailed analysis. Illustrated throughout with more than 125 reproductions of diaries, journals, typescripts, and paintings by Kerouac, as well as family photographs and striking portraits of Kerouac and his contemporaries, Beatific Soul is a fitting tribute to its subject on the fiftieth anniversary of his pioneering and best-known work. |
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