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The Portable Jack Kerouac (Portable Library) Paperback – March 1, 1996

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Product Details

  • Series: Portable Library
  • Paperback: 656 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (March 1, 1996)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0140178198
  • ISBN-13: 978-0140178197
  • Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 1.2 x 7.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 15.4 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #608,734 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
It's a classic . . .many have read, and it continues to have APPEAL. . . .
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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful By Alan Maleh on July 14, 2014
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
great book
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful By M. Hori on November 10, 2009
Format: Paperback
This is a great introduction to the range of styles and themes that Kerouac's artistry brings to the page. Ann Charters, who wrote one of the first and best of the long line of Kerouac biographies, shows herself to be a deft editor in this volume. She fits the "essential" chapters of Kerouac's major books together to present a mosaic of his talent and invites us to follow Kerouac from his "Town and City" Thomas Wolfe style through the wild marijuana sense-o-round syntax of "Dr. Sax" and "Mexico City Blues" to the benzedrine jack-hammers in "The Subterraneans," "On the Road" and "Visions of Cody". Along the way we see Kerouac's energy brown and shrivel in "The Dharma Bums"; his sentimentality run amuck in "Tristessa" and "Visions of Gerald." We read cobbled-together explanations of what "Beat" means, and the "first thought/best thought" of spontaneous prose that's become a siren song for so much post-post-post modern blather. "Who touches this book touches the man," Whitman said (or should have said, if he didn't), and the same surely applies to Kerouac, whose writing falters as his body falters and youth, health, mind and being fume away in a great "Bonfire of the Vanities." Charters gives the essentials to us--even down to the English language haiku complete with dead flies in medicine cabinets. Pick this book up first, along with the Charters' biography, then move on to Charters' Portable Beat Anthology, then branch out (if you need to) to the new volumes of Kerouac being "discovered" all the time and keep the dream, the romance of the "open road" going--along with the steady industry that Beat-dom has grown to become in the 21st century. In this chunky volume, Ann Charters presents the very best of Kerouac and does not pretend to redefine his worst writing as somehow his best, as do those with a vested interest in Kerouac the Buddhist Saint. For that, all clear-headed readers must thank her.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful By Alfred Johnson on September 26, 2009
Format: Paperback
Some of the general points made below have been used in other reviews of books and materials by and about Jack Kerouac.

"As I have explained in another entry in this space in a DVD review of the film documentary "The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg", recently I have been in a "beat" generation literary frame of mind. I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on Jack Kerouac's lesser work under review here, "Big Sur", that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space. Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell's `bad boy', the "king of the 1950s beat writers".

And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then, "On The Road", his classic modern physical and literary `search' for the meaning of America for his generation which came of age in post-World War II , readily comes to mind. No so well known, however, is the fact that that famous youthful novel was merely part of a much grander project, an essentially autobiographical exposition by Kerouac in many volumes starting from his birth in 1922, to chart and vividly describe his relationship to the events, great and small, of his times. Those volumes bear the general title "The Legend Of Duluoz".
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful By Richard H. Williams on December 23, 2011
Format: Paperback
This volume contains a list of Jack Kerouac's twenty-four published books extending from The Town and the City (1950)to Old Angel Midnight (1993)and Good Blonde & Others (1993), as well as his other publications and a small sampling of his letters.

An identity key is included to aid readers in relating the names of Kerouac's fictional characters to those of his friends and acquaintances.

His most famous book, On the Road, was viewed by Kerouac as a subset of a larger biographical work titled The Legend of Duluoz, which is the story of his lifetime, in which he is Jack Duluoz.

The editor, Dr. Ann Charters,partioned The Legend of Duluoz chronologically into selections from Dr. Sax, Visions of Gerard, Maggie Cassidy, Vanity of Duluoz, On the Road, The Subterraneans,Tristessa, The Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, and Big Sur.
There are additional sections titled Poetry, On Spontaneous Prose, The Modern Spontaneous Method, On Bop and the Beat Generation, and On Buddhism.

His earliest book publication, The Town and the City, is seen to be influenced by the writings of Thomas Wolfe, and in later works Kerouac is influenced by music in general and jazz and Bop in particular, as well as by Buddhism.

As the reader navagates this lengthy volume, it will be seen that the variations in Kerouac's many writing styles, some traditional and some experimental, can be disruptive.

Although it is convenient to have a systematic sampling of Jack Kerouac's writing in a well-organized and well-documented fashion, as the editor, Ann Charters, recommends, it is best to read the original works in their entirety.
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