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Big Sur

Name: Big Sur
Brand: Penguin Random House
Availability: InStock
Author: Jack Kerouac
ISBN: 9780593342763

Author: Jack Kerouac, Aram Saroyan

Narrator: Ethan Hawke

Unabridged: 6 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 10/06/2020

Categories: Fiction, Classic, Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A poignant masterpiece of wrenching personal expression from the author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums

In this 1962 novel, Kerouac's alter ego Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of balance. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, Big Sur "reveals consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion."

About The Author

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of “one vast book,” The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Leile on May 16, 2007

Kerouac's last stand, for all intents and purposes. The Beat Legend is in top form here, as he describes as best as we could ask him to the sickness and insanity that plagued his final years, shortly after the publication of On the Road. We watch in horror and sometimes sick fascination as his mind......more

Goodreads review by Dave on June 25, 2022

Forgive me for this ramble in the kinda sorta manner of. . . ohmygodno I did not want to read this book right now, I really did not. I am in the middle of reading the later books of the recently departed Philip Roth, unflinchingly facing decay and death, and I had to drive a few hours in a car and I......more

Goodreads review by P.E. on January 12, 2025

This Too Shall Pass In Big Sur, we follow the geographical and mental wanderings of the famous writer Jack Duluoz, the hero of the Duluoz Legend, as he agrees to travel across the States from NY to CA and settle for some time in a cabin located in the Big Sur Area, along the Central part of the Calif......more

Goodreads review by Karen on December 20, 2024

Catching up… Living where I do, not too far off of Hwy 1, on the beautiful Central Coast of California, I am fortunate to see the ocean as part of my every day walks with my husband and corgi dogs. I know how lucky I am as I take in sounds of the waves crashing onto the sand, or feeling my feet in th......more

Goodreads review by Matthew Ted on April 16, 2020

I like who I am when I read Kerouac, I love all the trees that go by on this train I’m on right now and I love all the sky that’s up above and the sun, its wide rays across all these fields and then the sun when it goes all sharp and pricks through the trees – And right now I’m forgiving everyone I’......more

Quotes

"In many ways, particularly in the lyrical immediacy that is his distinctive glory, this is Kerouac's best book . . . certainly, he has never displayed more 'gentle sweetness.'"
--San Francisco Chronicle

"Kerouac's grittiest novel to date and the one which will be read with most respect by those skeptical of all the Beat business in the first place."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Big Sur is so devastatingly honest and painful and yet so beautifully written....He was sharing his pain and suffering with the reader in the same way Dostoyevsky did, with the idea of salvation through suffering."
--David Amram