«Contemporary / American English One of the most famous American books of the century. Love, jazz, and excitement! These are all part of Sal Paradise's adventures «on the road» with wild friend Dean Moriarty, and their crazy companions, as they travel across the USA.»

«Never before published in Kerouac's lifetime, this 1955 biography of the founder of Buddhism is a clear and powerful study of Siddartha Gautama's life and works. «Wake Up» recounts the story of Prince Siddhartha's royal upbringing and his father's wish to protect him from all human suffering, despite a prediction that he would become a great holy man in later life. Departing from his father's palace, Siddhartha adopts a homeless life, struggles with his meditations, and eventually finds Enlightenment. Written at the end of Kerouac's career, when he became increasingly interested in Buddhist teachings, and collected for the first time in one book, this fresh and accessible biography is both an important addition to Kerouac's work and a valuable introduction to the world of Buddhism itself.»

The tale of Kerouac's alter-ego, Vanity of Duluoz presents Jack Duluoz's high school experiences as a sporting jock in Massachusetts and his time at Columbia University on a football scholarship. Just as Jack's glamorous new adult life begins, so does World War II, and he joins the US Navy to travel the world. As Jack experiences more, he realizes the limits of his former plans and returns to New York at the start of the Beat movement, to a riot of drugs, sex and writing. Vanity of Duluoz was Kerouac's final work published before his death in 1969.

This semi-autobiographical tale of Kerouac's own trip to France, to trace his ancestors and explore his own understanding of the Buddhism that came to define his beliefs, contains some of Kerouac's most lyrical descriptions. From his reports of the strangers he meets and the all-night conversations he enjoys in seedy bars in Paris and Brittany, to the moment in a cab he experiences Buddhism's satori — a feeling of sudden awakening — Kerouac's affecting and revolutionary writing transports the reader. Published at the height of his fame, Satori in Paris is a hectic tale of philosophy, identity and the powerful strangeness of travel.

Moodily atmospheric, full of verve and energy, Maggie Cassidy is Kerouac's poignant tale of teenage romance in New England. The story of Jack and Maggie, in love with the idea of being in love, looking ahead to marriage with hope and trepidation, is told with touching simplicity. It skillfully captures both the intensity and the ordinariness of adolescent life, with its torments and complications and is a beautiful evocation of growing up in America.

In 1944, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs were charged as accessories to murder. One of their friends, Lucien Carr, had stabbed another, David Kammerrer. Carr had come to each of them and confessed; Kerouac helped him get rid of the weapon — neither told the police. For this failing they were arrested. Months later, the two writers — unpublished at the time — collaborated on And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a fictionalized account of the summer of the killing.

An experimental novel which remained unpublished for years, Visions of Cody is Kerouac's fascinating examination of his own New York life, in a collection of colourful stream-of-consciousness essays. Transcribing taped conversations between members of their group as they took drugs and drank, this book reveals an intimate portrait of people caught up in destructive relationships with substances, and one another. Always fixated by Neal Cassady — the Cody of the title, renamed for the book along with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs — Kerouac also explores the feelings he had for a man who would inspire much of his work.

What's your road, man — holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Sal Paradise, young and innocent, joins the slightly crazed Dean Moriarty on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz becomes an exploration of personal freedom, a test of the limits of the American Dream. A brilliant blend of fiction and autobiography, Jack Kerouac's exhilarating novel defined the new Beat generation and became the bible of the counter culture.

It is the sum of myself, as far as the written word can go — Kerouac on The Town and the City. Kerouac's debut novel is a great coming of age story which can be read as the essential prelude to his later classics. Inspired by grief over his father's death and gripped by determination to write the Great American Novel, he draws largely on his own New England childhood.

The Subterraneans haunt the bars and clubs of San Francisco, surviving on a diet of booze and benzedrine, Proust and Verlaine. Living amongst them is Leo, an aspiring writer, and Mardou, half-Indian, half-Negro, beautiful and neurotic. Their bitter-sweet and ill-starred love affair sees Kerouac at his most evocative. Many regard this as being Kerouac's most touching and tender book.

On the Road chronicles Jack Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassady, a sideburned hero of the snowy West. As Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience. Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz combine to make On the Road an inspirational work of lasting importance.