On the Road (42 page)

“Absolutely out of the question, Sal!” Poor Remi, he had a special necktie made for this evening; on it was painted a replica of the concert tickets, and the names Sal and Laura and Remi and Vicki, the girl, together with a series of sad jokes and some of his favorite sayings such as “You can’t teach the old maestro a new tune.”

So Dean couldn’t ride uptown with us and the only thing I could do was sit in the back of the Cadillac and wave at him. The bookie at the wheel also wanted nothing to do with Dean. Dean, ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone, and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again. Poor little Laura, my baby, to whom I’d told everything about Dean, began almost to cry.

“Oh, we shouldn’t let him go like this. What’ll we do?”

Old Dean’s gone, I thought, and out loud I said, “He’ll be all right.” And off we went to the sad and disinclined concert for which I had no stomach whatever and all the time I was thinking of Dean and how he got back on the train and rode over three thousand miles over that awful land and never knew why he had come anyway, except to see me.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

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Hailed by
The New York Times
as the most beautifully executed, the clearest, and the most important utterance yet of the Beat Generation,
On the Road
is the kind of book people read, reread, and take to heart. Experience anew the classic story that broke open conformist 1950s America. This beautiful hardcover edition has been published to celebrate On the Road’s fortieth anniversary and makes an ideal gift or complement to the old battered paperback edition fans now own.

 

 

 

 

Written at the height of Kerouac’s commitment to Buddhism,
Some of the Dharma
confirms that he was not only “on the road” but also “on the path.” Begun as reading notes for Allen Ginsberg, the book evolved into a vast and all-encompassing work of experimental non-fiction into which Kerouac poured his life, incorporating poems, haiku, prayers, journal entries, meditations, fragments of letters, ideas about writing, overheard conversations, sketches, blues, and more. An intricate word mosaic, it is visually complex: each page is unique, filled with patterns and interlocking pieces of text.

□
BIG SUR

“A humane, precise account of the extraordinary ravages of alcohol delirium tremens on Kerouac.... Here we meet San Francisco’s poets & recognize hero Dean Moriarty ten years after
On the Road....
Here at the peak of his suffering, humorous genius, Kerouac wrote through his misery to end with ‘Sea,’ a brilliant poem appended on the hallucinatory Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur.”—Alien Ginsberg

 

□
THE DHARMA BUMS

Two ebullient young men search for Truth the Zen way: From yabyum and poetry in Berkeley, Marin County, and San Francisco, to solitude in the High Sierras and a vigil atop Desolation Peak in Washington State. Published just a year after Kerouac’s
On the Road
put the Beat Generation on the literary map,
The Dharma Bums
helped launch the “rucksack revolution.”
ISBN 0-14-004252-0

 

 

□
JACK KEROUAC

Written between 1940, when Kerouac was a freshman at college, and 1956, immediately before his leap into celebrity with the publication of
On the Road,
these personal, truthful, and mesmerizing letters offer valuable insights into his family life, friendships, travels, love affairs, and literary apprenticeship.
ISBN
0-14-023444-6

 

□
ON THE ROAD

Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty roar across America in the novel that defined the Beat Generation and changed the course of American writing. “The
Huckleberry Finn
of the mid-twentieth century.”
(The New York Times Book Review) ISBN 0-14-004259-8

 

□
THE PORTABLE JACK KEROUAC

Planned by the author before his death and completed by biographer Ann Charters, this anthology makes clear the ambition and accomplishment of Kerouac’s work. It presents selections from the “Legend of Duluoz” novels in chronological order, and also includes poetry, letters, and essays on Buddhism, writing, and the Beat Generation.

 

Allen Ginsberg described this gem of a short novel as “A narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a chihuahua dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junky lady, first in their crowded bedroom, then out to drunken streets, taco stands, & pads at dawn in Mexico City slums.”
ISBN
0-14-016811-7

 

The scenes and sensations of childhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, as revealed in the brief, tragic-happy life of Kerouac’s saintly brother, Gerard.
Visions of Gerard
is an unsettling, beautiful, and sad exploration of the meaning of existence.