Big Sur: Penguin Modern Classics
About this audiobook
Brought to you by Penguin.
Driven mad by three years of endless telegrams, phonecalls, mail, reporters and snoopers in the wake of his hugely successful novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac, 'King of the Beats', needs peace, quiet and sobriety: surrounded and outnumbered he has to 'get away to solitude again or die'. Amidst the wild beauty of the Californian landscape, Kerouac struggles to come to terms with his own myth and its malign impact upon his life. The result is a moving account of a man struggling with inner demons: blessed by great talent and cursed with an urge towards self-destruction - a path lined with double bourbons, Manhattans and scotch ...
'Kerouac's grittiest novel ... sensual and uninhibited' The New York Times
© Jack Kerouac 1962 (P) Penguin Audio 2021
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About the author
Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. Educated by Jesuit brothers in Lowell, he decided to become a writer at age seventeen and developed his own writing style, which he called 'spontaneous prose'. He used this technique to record the life of the American 'traveler' and the experiences of the Beat Generation, most memorably 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. Jack Kerouac died in 1969.
Ethan Hawke (Reader)
A four-time Academy Award nominee, twice for writing and twice for acting, ETHAN HAWKE has starred in the films Dead Poets Society, Reality Bites, Gattaca and Training Day, as well as Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise trilogy and Boyhood. He is the author of Rules for a Knight, The Hottest State, Ash Wednesday and A Bright Ray of Darkness. He lives in Brooklyn with his four children and his wife.
