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.
"In many ways, particularly in the lyrical immediacy that is his
distinctive glory, this is Kerouac's best book . . . certainly, he
has never displayed more 'gentle sweetness.'"
--San Francisco Chronicle
"Kerouac's grittiest novel to date and the one which will be read
with most respect by those skeptical of all the Beat business in
the first place."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Big Sur is so devastatingly honest and painful and yet so
beautifully written....He was sharing his pain and suffering with
the reader in the same way Dostoyevsky did, with the idea of
salvation through suffering."
--David Amram
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