Books with author Jack Kerouac

A deluxe edition of Kerouac?s masterpiece on the 50th anniversary of its first publicationFirst published in 1958, a year after On the Road had put the Beat generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouac?s most powerful, influential, and bestselling novels. The story focuses on two untrammeled young Americans?mountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writer?whose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Francisco?s Bohemia to solitude and mountain climbing in the High Sierras to Ray?s sixty-day vigil by himself atop Desolation Peak in Washington State. Primary to this evocative and soulful novel is an honest, exuberant search for an affirmative way of life in the midst of the atomic age. In many ways, The Dharma Bums also presaged the environmental, back-to-the-land, and American Buddhist movements of the 1960s and beyond.

Two ebullient young men search for Truth the Zen way: from marathon wine-drinking bouts, poetry jam sessions, and "yabyum" in San Francisco's Bohemia to solitude in the high Sierras and a vigil atop Desolation Peak in Washington State. Published just a year after "On the Road" put the Beat Generation on the map, "The Dharma Bums" is sparked by Kerouac's expansiveness, humor, and a contagious zest for life.