TofuFlyout Industrial-Sized Deals Best Books of the Month Shop Men's Classics Shop Men's Classics Shop Men's Learn more nav_sap_plcc_6M_fly_beacon $5 Albums See All Deals Storm Free Fire TV Stick with Purchase of Ooma Telo Grocery Home Improvement Shop all gdwf gdwf gdwf Amazon Echo Amazon Echo Kindle Voyage GNO Shop Now Deal of the Day
Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Buy Used
$7.49
Used: Good | Details
Sold by Remote Empire
Fulfilled by Amazon
Condition: Used: Good
Comment: Decent Quality Book in good condition, Pages and text are clean and unmarked, shows signs of aging, paper yellowed a bit - vintage, over all a very decent copy, Go green & buy used, Prompt Shipping and Friendly Customer Service From Dedicated Bookseller

Sorry, there was a problem.

There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. Please try again.

Sorry, there was a problem.

Wish List unavailable.
Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon
Flip to back Flip to front
Listen Playing... Paused   You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more
See this image

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

by
Jack Kerouac (Author)
› Visit Amazon's Jack Kerouac Page
Find all the books, read about the author, and more.
See search results for this author
Are you an author? Learn about Author Central
Jack Kerouac (Author),
Ann Charters (Editor)
› Visit Amazon's Ann Charters Page
Find all the books, read about the author, and more.
See search results for this author
Are you an author? Learn about Author Central
Ann Charters (Editor)
9 customer reviews
See all 5 formats and editions Hide other formats and editions
Amazon Price New from Used from
Hardcover
"Please retry"
—
$48.77 $2.50
Paperback
"Please retry"
$14.09
$10.36 $0.59
Paperback, March 1, 1996
—
$3.49 $0.01
Neverwhere: Author's Preferred Text by Neil Gaiman
"Neverwhere" by Neil Gaiman
Neverwhere is the story of Richard Mayhew, a young London businessman with a good heart and an ordinary life, which is changed forever when he is plunged through the cracks of reality into a world of shadows and darkness—the Neverwhere. Learn more | See related books

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.
Back
  1. The Dharma Bums
    Jack Kerouac
    297
    #1 Best Seller in Beat Generation Criticism
    Paperback
    $10.55 Prime
  2. The Portable Beat Reader (Penguin Classics)
    Ann Charters
    31
    Paperback
    $13.81 Prime
  3. Big Sur: (Penguin Ink)
    Jack Kerouac
    89
    Paperback
    $11.52 Prime
  4. On the Road
    Jack Kerouac
    1,246
    Paperback
    $9.32 Prime
  5. Inherit the Wind
    Jerome Lawrence
    105
    Mass Market Paperback
    $6.99 Prime
  6. Book of Sketches (Poets, Penguin)
    Jack Kerouac
    13
    Paperback
    $15.15 Prime
Next
NO_CONTENT_IN_FEATURE
Best Books of the Month
Best Books of the Month
Want to know our Editors' picks for the best books of the month? Browse Best Books of the Month, featuring our favorite new books in more than a dozen categories.

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: 15.2 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #669,021 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

    •  Would you like to update product info, give feedback on images, or tell us about a lower price?

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
It's All Here, Folks
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.
Comment Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback. If this review is inappropriate, please let us know.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful
WILD, WEIRD, WONDERFUL--- AND WOOLLY AND WOOZY,
By Donald A. Newlove on January 14, 2001
Format: Paperback
GRANTED that the selections are a mishmash of Kerouac styles, and at times misuse words with a kind of tender haughtiness and screw you if you don't like it but this is what I bruit. Bruit? But at his best Kerouac time and again tells us of that railroad earth and trains rolling under October skies and rushes up our noses with piney phrases that would raise gooseflesh on Thomas Wolfe. What's more, Ann Charters serves Jack nobly by inventively selecting along a timeline that captures the hero's age throughout, a superb bit of editing much like Malcolm Cowley's for The Portable Faulkner in which he patched together a groundbreaking picture of Yoknapatawpha County from Faulkner's many works. A Must-Have Kerouac volume that should break ground for new readers and give old admirers a bath in that old spontaneous prose he dreamed up nightly with candlelight on the kitchen table, booze, and weed. Some of it's mush, some visionary, and much of it just what writing should be: straight from the heart.
Comment Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback. If this review is inappropriate, please let us know.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
12 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Well edited, but it has continuity issues
By Matthew Blaschko on June 15, 1999
Format: Paperback
This collection is wonderfully edited. There are no major breaks in the plot and Ann Charters commentary provides a good context to understand the book (e.g. she provides a table that matches character names to actual people). However, since the books were written out of order, the immensely different writing styles of Kerouac's different novels do not mesh well at times. It is fine for somebody who has had previous exposure to Kerouac's writing and now wants a survey of all his different styles, but I would generally recommend buying the individual books.
Comment Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback. If this review is inappropriate, please let us know.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
A Jack Kerouac Potpourri
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".Read more ›
Comment Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback. If this review is inappropriate, please let us know.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

There's a problem loading this menu right now.

Learn more about Amazon Prime.



Want to discover more products? Check out these pages to see more: two girls making love, streets bedlam