Big Sur

Product Description<br/><br/>Coming down from his carefree youth and unwanted fame, Jack Kerouac undertakes a mature confrontation of some of his most troubling emotional issues: a burgeoning problem with alcoholism, addiction, fear, and insecurity. He dutifully records his ever-changing states of consciousness, which culminate in a powerful religious experience. Big Sur was written some time after Jack Kerouac's best-known works, following a visit to northern California and the first feelings of midlife crisis. Kerouac stayed for several weeks in a cabin in Big Sur, California, and with friends in San Francisco. Upon returning home, he wrote this account in a two-week period. Critic Richard Meltzer referred to Big Sur as Kerouac's 'masterpiece, and one of the great, great works of the English language.'<br/><br/>Review<br/><br/>Big Sur is a humane, precise account of the extraordinary ravages of alcohol delirium tremens on Kerouac....At the peak of his suffering humorous genius, he wrote through his misery to end with Sea, a brilliant poem appended on the hallucinatory sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur. --Allen Ginsberg<br/>For a narrator [this book] contains extraordinary difficulties, for the writing flies off into inebriated, overly long sentences that reflect, describe, or just babble forward in a kind of free association. To keep such passages flowing while making sense out of them is no mean feat. Tom Parker [Grover Gardner] pulls it off....He even manages to sound as if he were enjoying himself.--AudioFile<br/>'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<br/>Critic Richard Meltzer referred to Big Sur as Kerouac's 'masterpiece, and one of the great, great works of the English language.'<br/>His grittiest book...sensual and uninhibited. --New York Times --.<br/><br/>About the Author<br/><br/>JACK KEROUAC (1922 -1969) was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. He attended local Catholic schools and eventually Columbia University, becoming in the 1940s and 1950s a member of what was to be called the Beat generation. His first novel appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road (1957) that epitomized to the world the Beat philosophy.