Vanity of Duluoz, Jack Kerouac
Vanity of Duluoz, Jack Kerouac
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Vanity of Duluoz
An Adventurous Education, 1935–46

Author: Jack Kerouac

Narrator: Andrew Eiden

Unabridged: 8 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/17/2024

Categories: Fiction


Synopsis

Written in 1967 from the vantage point of the psychedelic sixties, Vanity of Duluoz is a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young man.This book presents the formative years in the life of Jack Duluoz—Kerouac’s alter ego—beginning with his high school experiences as a sporting jock in small-town New England and his time at Columbia University on a football scholarship. Just as Jack’s glamorous new adult life begins, so does World War II, and he joins the US Navy to travel the world. The more he experiences, the more he realizes the limits of his former plans and decides to and return to New York, where he collides with the start of the Beat movement—and a riot of drugs, sex, and writing. Vanity of Duluoz was Kerouac’s final work published before his death in 1969.

Author Bio

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.

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