Beat Generation

The Lost Work

Contributors

By Jack Kerouac

Introduction by A. M. Homes

Formats and Prices

Price

$19.99

Format

Trade Paperback

Format:

Trade Paperback $19.99

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around October 5, 2006. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

Beat Generation is a play about tension, about friendship, and about karma — what it is and how you get it. It begins one fine morning with a few friends, honest laborers some of them, some close to being down-and-out, passing around a bottle of wine. It ends with a kind of satori-like reaffirmation of the power of friendship, of doing good through not doing, and the intrinsic worth of the throw-away little exchanges that make up our lives. Written in 1957, the same year that On the Road was first published, and set in 1953, Beat Generation portrays an authentic and alternate 1950s America. Kerouac’s characters are working-class men and women — a step away from vagrants, but not a big step. Their dialogue positively sings, suggesting jazz riffs in their rhythm and content, and Kerouac, like a master composer, arranges it to magical effect. Here is the heart and soul of the beat mentality, the zeitgeist that blossomed over the decades and eventually culminated in the counter-culture of 1960s America. It’s a spirit that still lives.

Genre:

On Sale
Oct 5, 2006
Page Count
112 pages
Publisher
Da Capo Press
ISBN-13
9781560258940

Jack Kerouac

About the Author

Jack Kerouac was born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts. The best-known of his many works, On the Road, published in 1957, was an international bestseller. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, at the age of forty-seven.

Todd F. Tietchen is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where he teaches courses in Beat writing and contemporary American literature. He is the author of The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana, along with numerous articles on American art, literature, and intellectual history.

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