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PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
MAGGIE CASSIDY
Jack Kerouac was born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the descendant of Breton Canadians, and grew up as part of an alternative culture, speaking a regional, largely oral dialect of French, called Joual. In 1947, enthused by bebop, the rebel attitude of his friend Neal Cassady, and the subterranean throng of hobos, drug addicts and hustlers he encountered in New York, he decided to discover America and hitchhike across the country.
Kerouac gathered a wealth of material from his time on the road and his writing was openly autobiographical. He developed his own unique writing style, which he called ‘spontaneous prose’, and used this technique to record the experiences of the Beat Generation, most notably in On the Road and also in The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums.
His other works include Big Sur, Desolation Angels, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Gerard, Tristessa and a book of poetry called Mexico City Blues, and the posthumously published Some of the Dharma and The Book of Sketches. His first orthodox published novel was The Town and the City. Kerouac left several works unfinished, including a portrait of William Burroughs, when he died in 1969.