Visions of Cody, Jack Kerouac
Visions of Cody, Jack Kerouac
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Visions of Cody
Selections from the Novel

Author: Jack Kerouac

Narrator: Graham Parker

Abridged: 3 hr 7 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 10/01/1996


Synopsis

“To read On the Road but not Visions of Cody is to take a nice sightseeing tour but to forgo the spectacular rapids of Jack Kerouac’s wildest writings.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“The centerpiece of all [Kerouac’s] novels.”—The Washington Post
 
Originally written in 1951–1952, Visions of Cody was an underground classic by the time it was finally published in 1972, three years after Kerouac’s death. Utilizing a radical, experimental form (“the New Journalism fifteen years early,” as Dennis McNally noted in Desolate Angel), Kerouac examines his own New York life in a collection of colorful stream-of-consciousness essays. Always transfixed by Neal Cassady—here named Cody Pomeray—along with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Kerouac also explores the feelings he had for a man who inspired much of his work.
 
Transcribing taped conversations between members of their group as they took drugs and drank, Visions of Cody reveals an intimate portrait of people caught up in destructive relationships with substances, and one another, capturing the members of the Beat Generation in the years before any label had been affixed to them.

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 Katy on October 26, 2015

This was one of the hardest books for me to rate. Jack Kerouac was one of the most magnificent prose writers; that is something I firmly believe. I also believe that some of the best examples of his prolific, dynamic prose can be found in Visions of Cody. The reason for my three star rating is simpl......more

Goodreads review by Kevin on April 19, 2011

One of three books most influencial that I will Never finish TOO good to finish always more in store take it in take it out take it to take two or more it I for feel a it test saying thought things I hear it feeling things it couldn't say......more

Goodreads review by robin on October 24, 2024

Kerouac, America, And The Holy Goof Jack Kerouac (1922 -- 1969) wrote his long, sprawling book "Visions of Cody" in 1951-52, but the book was not published in full until 1972.. The book shows great nostalgia for a lost America of the 1930s and 1940s. The work is a meditation of Kerouac's friend Neal......more

Goodreads review by Rand on September 13, 2012

this book is a lyrical trip. if you're afraid of getting in too deep, don't bother trying. too many adjectives or clauses, but really, that's just the point. pass the tea already.......more

Goodreads review by Andy on September 18, 2017

When Jack Kerouac typed out On The Road it was on an endless scroll of paper, as if to indicate that he was writing on an endless path of paper about being "on the road". It was a wild concept, but the result was a somewhat structured work about wanderlust and all its wonders. Visions of Cody fulfil......more


Quotes

"[Y]ou will find some of Kerouac's very best writing in this book.  It is funny, it is serious. It is eloquent. To read "On the Road" but not "Visions of Cody" is to take a nice sightseeing tour but to forgo the spectacular rapids of Jack Kerouac's wildest writing." —The New York Times Book Review

Visions of Cody is [Kerouac's] greatest book, according to his own opinion, and its music is testimony to [his] verbal inventiveness and virtuosity . . . the range and variation of style within his remarkably growing bookshelf is just as remarkable . . . there is a grace, a majesty, and a tenderness to his language . . . both the inspiration and the content of this literature is of an intuitive, emotional, and mystical nature.” —The Village Voice

"The most sincere and holy writing I know of our age." —Allen Ginsburg