Discussions about Jack Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts and its influence on his writings.

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Discussions of the immediate and extended family of Jack Kerouac

Discussions of Jack Kerouac's many travels and its influence on his life and work.

Press articles about Jack Kerouac and his work in general.

Interviews with and about Jack Kerouac

Freelance writing of and about Jack Kerouac and his writings.

Correspondence to and from Jack Kerouac.

Discuss Jack Kerouac's French-Canadian ancestry and written works here.

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What books did Jack Kerouac read and how did they shape him as a writer?

Visual art by and influenced by the life and work of Jack Kerouac

Articles by and about the many friends and acquaintances of Jack Kerouac.

On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across America. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations. It was published by Viking Press in September 1957.

Sub-boards: General Discussion, Reviews

The Dharma Bums is a novel by Jack Kerouac. The basis for the novel's semi-fictional accounts are events occurring years after the events of On the Road. It was published by Viking Press in 1958.

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The Subterraneans is a semi-fictional account of a short romance with a woman named Alene Lee (1931-1991) in New York's Greenwich Village in1953. It was published by Grove Press in 1958.

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Doctor Sax (Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three) is a novel published by Grove Press in 1959. The novel was partially-written in 1952 while living with William S. Burroughs in Mexico City.

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Maggie Cassidy is a novel first published by Avon in 1959. It is a largely autobiographical work about Kerouac's early life in Lowell, Massachusetts from 1938 to 1939, chronicling his real-life relationship with his teenage sweetheart Mary Carney.

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Visions of Cody is an experimental novel written in 1951-1952. It was posthumously-published in full in 1972.

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Big Sur is a nove published by Fararr, Straus and Cudahy in September 1962. It recounts the events surrounding Jack Duluoz's (Jack Kerouac) three brief sojourns to a cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur, owned by Kerouac's friend and Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

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Visions of Gerard is a 1963 novel published by Farrar, Straus & Company in 1963. It is the first volume in Kerouac's "Duluoz Legend". Visions of Gerard focuses on the scenes and sensations of childhood as evidenced in the tragically short yet happy life of Kerouac's older brother, Gerard.

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Desolation Angels is a semi-autobiographical novel which makes up part of his Duluoz Legend and published by Coward McCann in 1965.

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Satori in Paris is a 1966 novella published by Grove Press in 1966. It is a short, autobiographical tale of Kerouac's trip to Paris, then Brittany, to research his genealogy.

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Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46 is a semi-autobiographical novel published by Coward McCann in 1968. It describes the adventures of Kerouac's alter ego, Jack Duluoz between 1935 and 1946.

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And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is a novel by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs written in 1945 and published in 2008 by Grove Press. Written in the form of a mystery novel, the book consists of alternating chapters by each author writing as a different character.

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On the Road (The Original Scroll) is a 2007 book published by Viking Penguin. It is a facsimile of the original teletype scroll draft typed during the span of three weeks in April 1951.

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Published for the first time in book form, Wake Up is Kerouac’s retelling of the story of Prince Siddhartha Gautama, who as a young man abandoned his wealthy family and comfortable home for a lifelong search for Enlightenment. As a compendium of the teachings of the Buddha, Wake Up is a profound meditation on the nature of life, desire, wisdom, and suffering. Distilled from a wide variety of canonical scriptures, Wake Up serves as both a concise primer on the concepts of Buddhism and as an insightful and deeply personal document of Kerouac’s evolving beliefs. It is the work of a devoted spiritual follower of the Buddha who also happened to be one of the twentieth century’s most influential novelists.

The Scripture of the Golden Eternity is a book of 66 prose poems written by American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac, first published in 1960 by Corinth Books, New York City.

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[Note: this pertains to the transcription of Kerouac's narration of the Robert Frank film of the same name.]

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Old Angel Midnight is a long narrative prose-poem culled from five notebooks spanning from 1956 to 1959, while Kerouac was fully absorbed by his studies of Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy.

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Notes on Buddhist study and practice, poems, blues, haiku, conversations, prayers, meditations, journal entries, sketches, stories, thoughts on writing, fragments of letters, epiphanies and more...

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Tristessa published by Avon in 1960. It is a narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junky lady.

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Pic is the name of a precocious 10-year-old with his brother traveling on the road and in New York City. It was published posthumously in 1971.

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In these uncollected writings Jack Kerouac portrays himself in his life. He hitches a ride to San Francisco with a blonde, goes on the road with photographer Robert Frank, rides bus through the Northwest and Montana, records the blues of an old Negro hobo, talks about the Beats and how it all began, gives his "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" and defends his novel The Subterraneans, compares Shakespeare and James Joyce, describes the cafeterias and subways of Manhattan, goes to a ballgame and a prize fight, and reflects on Christmas in New England, on Murnau's Nosferatu, on jazz & bop, and tells us what he's thinking about.

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These writings reveal what Kerouac was thinking, doing, and dreaming during his formative years, and reflect his primary literary influences. Published by Viking Penguin in 1999.

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Orpheus Emerged is a novella written in 1945 and published in 2002. It chronicles the passions, conflicts, and dreams of a group of bohemians searching for truth while studying at a university.

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The Haunted Life, skillfully edited by University of Massachusetts at Lowell Assistant Professor of English Todd F. Tietchen, is rounded out by sketches, notes, and reflections Kerouac kept during the novella's composition, as well as a revealing selection of correspondence with his father, Leo Kerouac.

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The Unknown Kerouac presents two lost novels, The Night Is My Woman and Old Bull in the Bowery, which Kerouac wrote in French during the especially fruitful years of 1951 and 1952 and translated into English by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, who incorporates Kerouac’s own partial translations.Also included are two journals from the heart of this same crucial period. In Private Philologies, Riddles, and a Ten-Day Writing Log, Kerouac recounts a brief stay in Denver—where he works on an early version of On the Road, reads dime novels, and even rides in a rodeo—and shows him contemplating writers like Chaucer and Joyce and playing with riddles and etymologies. Journal 1951, begun during a stay in a Bronx VA hospital, charts, in ecstatic, moving, and self-revealing pages, the wave of insights and breakthroughs that led Kerouac to the most singular transformation of American prose style since Hemingway.

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Scattered Poems consists of spontaneous poetry gathered from underground and ephemeral publications; including "San Francisco Blues," the variant texts of "Pull My Daisy," and American haiku.It was published by City Lights Press in 1971.

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Trip Trap was originally published in 1973. It features the haiku Jack Kerouac, Albert Saijo, and Lew Welch jotted down on the road from San Francisco to New York in 1959.

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The original manuscript of this book, written between 1954 and 1965, has been in the safekeeping of City Lights all the years since Kerouac's death in 1969. Reaching beyond the scope of his Mexico City Blues, here are pomes about Mexico and Tangier, Berkeley and the Bowery. Mid-fifties road poems, hymns and songs of God, drug poems, wine poems, dharma poems and Buddhist meditations. Poems to Beat friends, goofball poems, quirky haiku, and a fine, long elegy in "Canuckian Child Patoi Probably Medieval . . . an English blues." But more than a quarter of a century after it was written, Pomes of All Sizes today would seem to be more than a sum of it parts, revealing a questing Kerouac grown beyond the popular image of himself as a Beat on the Road.

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Book of Blues consists of eight extended poems, composed between 1954 and 1961 offering exuberant forays into language and consciousness combining rich imagery, complex internal rhythms, and a reverent attentiveness to the present.

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Highlighting a lesser-known aspect of one of America's most influential authors, this new collection displays Jack Kerouac's interest in and mastery of haiku. Experimenting with this compact poetic genre throughout his career, Kerouac often included haiku in novels, correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings.

Sub-boards: General Discussion, Reviews

Poetry was at the center of Jack Kerouac’s sense of mission as a writer. “I’d better be a poet / Or lay down dead,” he wrote in “San Francisco Blues.” The celebrated “spontaneous bop prosody” of his prose was a direct outgrowth of the poetry that filled his notebooks throughout his writing life. This landmark edition gathers for the first time all of Kerouac’s major poetic works—Mexico City Blues, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, Book of Blues, Pomes All Sizes, Old Angel Midnight, Desolation Pops, Book of Haikus—along with a rich assortment of his uncollected poems, six published here for the first time.

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Sub-boards: Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Clellon Holmes, Diane Di Prima, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso

Sub-boards: General Discussion, Kerouac (1973) - Ann Charters, Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac (1978) - Barry Gifford & Lawrence Lee, Memory Babe (1983) - Gerald Nicosia, Visions of Rocky Mount (1991) - John Dorfner, Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac (1999) - Ellis Amburn, Jack Kerouac: A Biography (2001) - Tom Clark, Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, and America (2003) - Dennis McNally, Kerouac: His Life and Work (2007) - Paul Maher Jr., The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac (2013) - Joyce Johnson

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