Table of Contents

The Portable Jack KerouacPreface
Introduction
Chronology of Jack Kerouac's Life
Kerouac's Introduction

THE LEGEND OF DULUOZ

Editor's Introduction

from Doctor Sax
"It was in Centralville I was born . . . across the wide basin to the hill—on Lupine Road, March 1922, at five o'clock . . ."

from Visions of Gerard
"For the first four years of my life, while he lived, I was not Ti Jean Duluoz, I was Gerard, the world was his face . . ."

"Home at Christmas"
"It's a Sunday afternoon in New England just three days before Christmas . . ."

from Dr. Sax
"Two o'clock—strange—thunder and the yellow walls of my mother's kitchen with the green electric clock . . ."

from Maggie Cassidy
"The Concord River flows be her house, in July evening the ladies of Massachusetts Street are sitting on wooden doorsteps with newspapers for fans . . ."

from Vanity of Duluoz
"What dreams you get when you think you're going to go to college . . ."

from On the Road
"With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road . . ."

"The Mexican Girl" (from On the Road)
"I had bought my ticket and was waiting for the L. A. bus . . ."

from On the Road
"It was drizzling and mysterious at the beginning of our journey . . ."

"Jazz of the Beat Generation"
"Out we jumped in the warm mad night hearing a wild tenorman's bawling horn . . ."

from "The Railroad Earth" (from Lonesome Traveler)
"There was a little alley in San Francisco back of the Southern Pacific station at Third and Townsend in redbrick of drowsy lazy afternoons . . ."

from The Subterraneans
"I had never heard such a story from such a soul except from the great men I had known in my youth, great heroes of America . . ."

from Tristessa
"I'm riding along with Tristessa in the cab, drunk, with big bottle of Juarez Bourbon whiskey in the till-bag railroad lootbag . . ."

from The Dharma Bums
"Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 . . ."

from "Good Blonde"
" 'Damn,' said I, 'I'll just hitchhike on the highway' (101) seeing the fast flash of many cars . . ."

from The Dharma Bums
"In Berkeley I was living with Alvah Goldbrook in his little rose-covered cottage in the backyard of a bigger house on Milvia Street . . ."

from Desolation Angels
"It was on this trip that the great change took place in my life . . ."

from Big Sur
"The last time I ever hitch hiked—And NO RIDES a sign . . ."

POETRY

Editor's Introduction

from San Francisco Blues
"Daydreams for Ginsberg"
"Rose Pome"
"Woman"
"Rimbaud"
"Hymn" ("And when you showed me Brooklyn Bridge")
"Poem" ("I demand that the human race ceases multiplying")
"A Pun for Al Gelpi"
"Two Poems Dedicated to Thomas Merton"
"How to Meditate"
"Hitch Hiker"
"Pome on Doctor Sax"

from Book of Haikus: "Some Western Haikus"
"Sea: The Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur"

ON SPONTANEOUS PROSE

Editor's Introduction

"Belief and Technique for Modern Prose"
"Essentials of Spontaneous Prose"
"The First Word: Jack Kerouac Takes a Fresh Look at Jack Kerouac"
"Are Writers Made or Born?"

THE MODERN SPONTANEOUS METHOD

Editor's Introduction

"In the Ring"
"On the Road to Florida"

from Visions of Cody
"The Three Stooges"
"Well, Cody is always interested in himself . . ."
"Joan Rawshanks in the Fog"

from Book of Dreams
from Old Angel Midnight

ON BOP AND THE BEAT GENERATION

Editor's Introduction

"The Beginning of Bop"
"About the Beat Generation"
"Lamb, No Lion"
"Beatific: The Origins of the Beat Generation"
"After Me, the Deluge"

ON BUDDHISM

Editor's Introduction

"The Last Word: Because none of us want to think that the universe is a blank dream . . ."

from Book of Dreams
from The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

SELECTED LETTERS

Editor's Introduction

To Norma Blickfelt, August 25, 1942
Young merchant seaman Kerouac describes his dream of becoming a writer

To Neal Cassady, May 22, 1951
Account to Neal about "my book about you" (On the Road)

To John Clellon Holmes, June 3, 1952
"Wild form's the only form holds what I have to say . . ."

To Allen Ginsberg, October 1, 1957
"Everything's been happening here" the week after publication of On the Road

To Allen Ginsberg, September 22, 1960
Description of West Coast trip later dramatized in Big Sur

To Sterling Lord, May 5, 1961
List of books comprising the Duluoz Legend

To Ann Charters, August 5, 1966
Invitation to visit him in Hyannis and work together on his bibliography: "I've kept the neatest records you ever saw"

Identity Key
Books by Jack Kerouac
List of Originally Published Sources

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.

Ann Charters is the editor of The Portable Sixties Reader, The Portable Jack Kerouac, two volumes of Jack Kerouac's Selected Letters, and Beat Down to Your Soul. She teaches at the University of Connecticut.

Reviews

"Kerouac's work represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation."
-The New York Times Book Review

Much as Viking's Portable William Faulkner rekindled interest in Faulkner because his editor, Malcolm Cowley, had the brainstorm of pulling together a map of Faulkner's epic Yoknapatawpha County series of novels and stories in order to give the work a new coherence, so Kerouac gains new stature as a result of labors by his biographer, Charters (Kerouac: A Biography). Here she chronologically excerpts the perhaps 16 volumes of the Legend of Duluoz to create a map of Kerouac's oeuvre, which, according to the publisher, he had planned before his death. She supports it not only with fat slices of Kerouac's best writing but also with an investigation into his bop prosody that gives his jazz-riff style a new currency. In fact, this volume may deal a fist in the face of the English sentence, because Kerouac's revamping of the sentence is so song-filled and emotion-ridden that its properties could well do for American prose what Whitman did for verse: give it new life. An alcoholic jamming by candlelight with scotch and pot on the kitchen table, he mixes jazz with Rimbaud's derangement of the senses to create a vehicle for his own anguish as he recollects his life on the run. The Portable shows Kerouac at his best as a riff artist but also gathers to stronger effect than any single Kerouac novel. Includes selections from his poetry and experimental novels. (Mar.)

"Kerouac's work represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation."
-The New York Times Book Review