Desolate Angel

Desolate Angel
Author :
Publisher : Hachette Books
Total Pages : 473
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780306875205
ISBN-13 : 0306875209
Rating : 4/5 (05 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Desolate Angel by : Dennis McNally

Download or read book Desolate Angel written by Dennis McNally and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A blockbuster of a biography . . . absolutely magnificent."--San Francisco Chronicle Jack Kerouac--"King of the Beats," unwitting catalyst for the '60s counterculture, groundbreaking author--was a complex and compelling man: a star athlete with a literary bent; a spontaneous writer vilified by the New Critics but adored by a large, youthful readership; a devout Catholic but aspiring Buddhist; a lover of freedom plagued by crippling alcoholism. Desolate Angel follows Kerouac from his childhood in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, to his early years at Columbia where he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, beginning a four-way friendship that would become a sociointellectual legend. In rich detail and with sensitivity, Dennis McNally recounts Kerouac's frenetic cross-country journeys, his experiments with drugs and sexuality, his travels to Mexico and Tangier, the sudden fame that followed the publication of On the Road, the years of literary triumph, and the final near-decade of frustration and depression. Desolate Angel is a harrowing, compassionate portrait of a man and an artist set in an extraordinary social context. The metamorphosis of America from the Great Depression to the Kennedy administration is not merely the backdrop for Kerouac's life but is revealed to be an essential element of his art . . . for Kerouac was above all a witness to his exceptional times.

Freedom Libraries

Freedom Libraries
Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages : 209
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781538115541
ISBN-13 : 1538115549
Rating : 4/5 (41 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Freedom Libraries by : Mike Selby

Download or read book Freedom Libraries written by Mike Selby and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom Libraries: The Untold Story of Libraries for African-Americans in the South. As the Civil Rights Movement exploded across the United States, the media of the time was able to show the rest of the world images of horrific racial violence. And while some of the bravest people of the 20th century risked their lives for the right to simply order a cheeseburger, ride a bus, or use a clean water fountain, there was another virtually unheard of struggle—this one for the right to read. Although illegal, racial segregation was strictly enforced in a number of American states, and public libraries were not immune. Numerous libraries were desegregated on paper only: there would be no cards given to African-Americans, no books for them read, and no furniture for them to use. It was these exact conditions that helped create Freedom Libraries. Over eighty of these parallel libraries appeared in the Deep South, staffed by civil rights voter registration workers. While the grassroots nature of the libraries meant they varied in size and quality, all of them created the first encounter many African-Americans had with a library. Terror, bombings, and eventually murder would be visited on the Freedom Libraries—with people giving up their lives so others could read a library book. This book delves into how these libraries were the heart of the Civil Rights Movement, and the remarkable courage of the people who used them. They would forever change libraries and librarianship, even as they helped the greater movement change the society these libraries belonged to. Photographs of the libraries bring this little-known part of American history to life.

Jack Kerouac's On the Road

Jack Kerouac's On the Road
Author :
Publisher : Infobase Publishing
Total Pages : 261
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780791075814
ISBN-13 : 0791075818
Rating : 4/5 (14 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Jack Kerouac's On the Road by : Harold Bloom

Download or read book Jack Kerouac's On the Road written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents ten critical essays published between 1973 and 2001 on Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," and includes a chronology, a bibliography, and an introduction by Harold Bloom.

Book of Sketches

Book of Sketches
Author :
Publisher : Penguin
Total Pages : 433
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781440626494
ISBN-13 : 1440626499
Rating : 4/5 (94 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Book of Sketches by : Jack Kerouac

Download or read book Book of Sketches written by Jack Kerouac and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-04-04 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1952 and 1953 as he wandered around America, Jack Kerouac jotted down spontaneous prose poems, or "sketches" as he called them, on small notebooks that he kept in his shirt pockets. The poems recount his travels—New York, North Carolina, Lowell (Massachusetts, Kerouac’s birthplace), San Francisco, Denver, Kansas, Mexico—observations, and meditations on art and life. The poems are often strung together so that over the course of several of them, a little story—or travelogue—appears, complete in itself. Published for the first time, Book of Sketches offers a luminous, intimate, and transcendental glimpse of one of the most original voices of the twentieth century at a key time in his literary and spiritual development.

Maggie Cassidy

Maggie Cassidy
Author :
Publisher : Penguin
Total Pages : 183
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781101548790
ISBN-13 : 1101548797
Rating : 4/5 (90 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Maggie Cassidy by : Jack Kerouac

Download or read book Maggie Cassidy written by Jack Kerouac and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1993-08-01 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bard of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac's Maggie Cassidy is a profoundly moving, autobiographical novel of adolescence and first love One of the dozen books written by Jack Kerouac in the early and mid-1950s, Maggie Cassidy was not published until 1959, after the appearance of On the Road had made its author famous overnight. Long out of print, this touching novel of adolescent love in a New England mill town, with its straight-forward narrative structure, is one of Kerouac's most accesible works. It is a remarkable, bittersweet evocation of the awkwardness and the joy of growing up in America.

Why Kerouac Matters

Why Kerouac Matters
Author :
Publisher : Penguin
Total Pages : 232
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781101202654
ISBN-13 : 1101202653
Rating : 4/5 (54 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Why Kerouac Matters by : John Leland

Download or read book Why Kerouac Matters written by John Leland and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-08-16 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legions of youthful Americans have taken On the Road as a manifesto for rebellion and an inspiration to hit the road. But there is much more to the book than that. In Why Kerouac Matters, John Leland embarks on a wry, insightful, and playful discussion of the novel, arguing that it still matters because it lays out an alternative road map to growing up. Along the way, Leland overturns many misconceptions about On the Road as he examines the lessons that Kerouac's alter ego, Sal Paradise, absorbs and dispenses on his novelistic journey to manhood, and how those lessons-about work and money, love and sex, art and holiness - still reverberate today.

The Voice Is All

The Voice Is All
Author :
Publisher : Penguin
Total Pages : 651
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781101601068
ISBN-13 : 110160106X
Rating : 4/5 (68 Downloads)

Book Synopsis The Voice Is All by : Joyce Johnson

Download or read book The Voice Is All written by Joyce Johnson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 651 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking portrait of Kerouac as a young artist—from the award-winning author of Minor Characters In The Voice is All, Joyce Johnson, author of her classic memoir, Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac, brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac’s French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider’s vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road, followed by Visions of Cody. By illuminating Kerouac’s early choice to sacrifice everything to his work, The Voice Is All deals with him on his own terms and puts the tragic contradictions of his nature and his complex relationships into perspective.