Author: Paul Maher
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1589796888
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
Jack Kerouac was one of America's great writers of the latter half of the 20th century, yet he endured a life characterized by persistent hardship and disillusion. Leading Kerouac scholar Paul Maher Jr. targets the writer's embattled insight of self as central to his life and work. He reveals how Kerouac's troubled interactions with alcohol, drugs, and spirituality stamped its importance on his autobiographical prose and poetry and created a singular language that united thoughts on the human condition and spiritual liberation. Becoming Kerouac: A Writer In His Time affixes Kerouac's life and art in a fresh way, giving readers a rich perspective from which to understand this 20th-century literary genius. Using unpublished archival material, Becoming Kerouac focuses on the writer's critical formative years ––1940 to 1957–– to demonstrate his growth as a novelist and poet. Maher contends that Kerouac developed his singular language to capture human consciousness as it never had before. His futilities catapulted American literature to reflect its restless post-World War II anxieties. Narrating the events that comprised Kerouac's life, biographers have long struggled to illustrate his complexness and the contradictions that shaped his determinations and dogged his relationships. But without consideration of the writing, the troubles in life fail to reveal their deeper resonances by skillfully analyzing the work while tracing the events. Maher achieves a full portrait, revealing struggles that problematize his work. Becoming Kerouac fuses Kerouac's life and art to comprehend this misunderstood literary genius.
Author: Elbert Lenrow
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443824763
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 95
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Book Description
Kerouac Ascending: Memorabilia of the Decade of On the Road is a memoir written by Elbert Lenrow about his relationship with Jack Kerouac, whom he taught at the New School in New York when Jack was emerging as a writer, and with Allen Ginsberg, both of whom Lenrow befriended and encouraged. Lenrow writes with sympathy and charm about both writers and their “beat” friends, revealing Kerouac’s seriously academic side by sharing papers he wrote in his course and giving insight about both writers through letters and poems they shared or wrote in Lenrow’s apartment. In her preface, Katherine Burkman, editor and cousin to Lenrow, gives a context for the memoir, expanding on Lenrow’s gifts as a teacher while Lenrow’s niece, Barbara Phillips, adds further insights. Howard Cunnell’s Introduction offers excellent material on the young Kerouac’s development, partly under Lenrow’s tutelage. An appendix of Ginsberg’s handwritten letters to Elbert, typewritten in the memoir, reveals the drama of his own handwriting and the enormous warmth in his relationship with Lenrow over a period of many years. With an introduction by Howard Cunnell.
Author: Tim Hunt
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472052160
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
A new critical perspective on Kerouac's work and his textual practices.
Author: Hilary Holladay
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809328836
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
Combining essays from renowned Kerouac experts and emerging scholars, What's Your Road, Man? draws on an enormous amount of research into the literary, social, cultural, biographical, and historical contexts of Kerouac's canonical novel. Since its publication in 1957, On the Road has remained in print and has continued to be one of the most widely read twentieth-century American novels.
Author: Richard Price
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820362662
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
Beginning with a high schooler mesmerized by a stay on the Navajo and Hopi reservations and running through the founding of a major university department and the aftermath of a decision, a decade later, to forego permanent academic affiliations, Richard Price’s story is told with honesty, humor, and insight into the inner workings of academic politics from the 1960s to the present. Inside/Outside relates his life as an anthropologist, historian, and Caribbeanist—from conducting predawn discussions with Maroon historians deep in the rainforest of Suriname to editing the world’s first book series on Atlantic history and culture; from weekly meetings with Claude Le ́vi-Strauss in Paris to long-term collaboration with Sidney Mintz; from adventures at sea with Martiniquan fishermen to negotiating the ivory towers of Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins; from explorations of the art of Romare Bearden to number crunching from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. It is a tale of life experiences and often-unconventional life decisions, inside (and outside) the academic world. Readers look over Price’s shoulders—and those of his wife and research partner, Sally Price—as he developed the ideas for some of the twentieth- and twenty-first century’s most important books in the fields of history, anthropology, and Caribbean studies.
Author: Bradley J. Stiles
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838639603
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
Stiles hopes to correct some popular misreadings of the nineteenth-century writers and provide a new approach to reading the twentieth-century authors by juxtaposing them alongside their predecessors."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101437138
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 612
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Book Description
The first collection of letters between the two leading figures of the Beat movement Writers and cultural icons Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg are the most celebrated names of the Beat Generation, linked together not only by their shared artistic sensibility but also by a deep and abiding friendship, one that colored their lives and greatly influenced their writing. Editors Bill Morgan and David Stanford shed new light on this intimate and influential friendship in this fascinating exchange of letters between Kerouac and Ginsberg, two thirds of which have never been published before. Commencing in 1944 while Ginsberg was a student at Columbia University and continuing until shortly before Kerouac's death in 1969, the two hundred letters included in this book provide astonishing insight into their lives and their writing. While not always in agreement, Ginsberg and Kerouac inspired each other spiritually and creatively, and their letters became a vital workshop for their art. Vivid, engaging, and enthralling, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters provides an unparalleled portrait of the two men who led the cultural and artistic movement that defined their generation.
Author: Ellen Pearlman
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1583943633
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
In America in the late 1950s and early 60s, the world—and life itself—became a legitimate artist’s tool, aligning with Zen Buddhism’s emphasis on “enlightenment at any moment” and living in the now. Simultaneously and independently, parallel movements were occurring in Japan, as artists there, too, strove to break down artistic boundaries. Nothing and Everything brings these heady times into focus. Author Ellen Pearlman meticulously traces the spread of Buddhist ideas into the art world through the classes of legendary scholar D. T. Suzuki as well as those of his most famous student, composer and teacher John Cage, from whose teachings sprouted the art movement Fluxus and the “happenings” of the 1960s. Pearlman details the interaction of these American artists with the Japanese Hi Red Center and the multi-installation group Gutai. Back in New York, abstract-expressionist artists founded The Club, which held lectures on Zen and featured Japan’s first abstract painter, Saburo Hasegawa. And in the literary world, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were using Buddhism in their search for new forms and visions of their own. These multiple journeys led to startling breakthroughs in artistic and literary style—and influenced an entire generation. Filled with rare photographs and groundbreaking primary source material, Nothing and Everything is the definitive history of this pivotal time for the American arts. About the Imprint: EVOLVER EDITIONS promotes a new counterculture that recognizes humanity's visionary potential and takes tangible, pragmatic steps to realize it. EVOLVER EDITIONS explores the dynamics of personal, collective, and global change from a wide range of perspectives. EVOLVER EDITIONS is an imprint of North Atlantic Books and is produced in collaboration with Evolver, LLC.
Author: Robert Roper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1632860864
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
A unique portrait of Vladimir Nabokov told through the lens of the years he spent in a land that enchanted him, America. The author of the immortal Lolita and Pale Fire, born to an eminent Russian family, conjures the apotheosis of the high modernist artist: cultured, refined-as European as they come. But Vladimir Nabokov, who came to America fleeing the Nazis, came to think of his time here as the richest of his life. Indeed, Nabokov was not only happiest here, but his best work flowed from his response to this exotic land. Robert Roper fills out this period in the writer's life with charm and insight- covering Nabokov's critical friendship with Edmund Wilson, his time at Cornell, his role at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. But Nabokov in America finds its narrative heart in his serial sojourns into the wilds of the West, undertaken with his wife, Vera, and their son over more than a decade. Nabokov covered more than 200,000 miles as he indulged his other passion: butterfly collecting. Roper has mined fresh sources to bring detail to these journeys, and traces their significant influence in Nabokov's work: on two-lane highways and in late-'40s motels and cafés, we feel Lolita draw near, and understand Nabokov's seductive familiarity with the American mundane. Nabokov in America is also a love letter to U.S. literature, in Nabokov's broad embrace of it from Melville to the Beats. Reading Roper, we feel anew the mountain breezes and the miles logged, the rich learning and the Romantic mind behind some of Nabokov's most beloved books.
Author: Mark Sayers
Publisher: Moody Publishers
ISBN: 0802489400
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 31
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Book Description
The content in this short e-book is excerpted from The Road Trip That Changed the World, by Mark Sayers. The book examines the influence of Jack Kerouac on Western Culture and the Church from a Christian perspective. We live in a culture of the road—restless for adventure, glorifying experience, seeing life as a journey. Dissatisfied with where we are, we are constantly on the move to redefine our sense of home. Why do we see the world like this? How did we come to believe that our best chance of finding home is to be constantly moving? Jack Kerouac was one of America’s original proponents of the culture of the road, documenting his famous road trip across America in his classic work, On the Road. The standards he set forth in that book have influenced Western culture and church so much that we still read his book, echo his philosophies, and make movies in the vein of his iconic road trip. (A movie adaptation of On the Road is set to release winter 2012.) In this twenty-minute read, Australian cultural commentator Mark Sayers examines how Kerouac’s influence has shaped Western traditions, our cultural identity, and the church. By analyzing our culture of the road and its influence on us, he leads us to understanding what it means to have a true sense of home.
