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› Find signed collectible books: 'Atop an Underwood'
Jack Kerouac's buddy William Burroughs once told an interviewer that Jack had written about a million words by the time he turned 22, and poet and editor Paul Marion publishes 80,000 of them for the first time in Atop an Underwood: jazz reviews written in high school, several rushing headlong poems, short stories (Kerouac dashed off some 200 during his 1941 stint working in a Hartford gas station), essays, radio plays, self-exhortations, an excerpt from the novel The Sea Is My Brother. Marion takes what he calls a "documentary approach," grouping together pieces by period, subject, circumstance of composition. And what emerges from the whole is a terrifically fresh, vivid, and engaging portrait of the Beat artist as a young man.
Kerouac, even in his teens, was riffing on his big themes--the restless quest for meaning along "the marathon alleys of life"; the lonely majesty of "the real, true, America, America in the night"; the fleeting pleasures of love, sex, comradeship, food, and drink; the compulsion to set down his experiences in swift, fluid prose. There are no buried masterpieces or stunning revelations here, but every piece hums with the spontaneity and immediacy of Kerouac's voice. Reading these youthful jottings is like hanging out at one of those all-night bull sessions when Kerouac and his pals "talked about eternity and infinity and the government and Reds and women and things..."
"I will write a play about life as life is and I will wait till it hits me in the face before I write it," he proclaimed when he was 18. "Then I will rush to my typewriter and write it. So hold on to your seats. It will soon come and I feel terrifically exuberated right just now." Atop an Underwood is a record of the many forms that exuberation took during the years when life first started to hit Kerouac in the face. --David Laskin [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Atop an Underwood : Early Stories and Other Writings'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Baby Driver'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Beat down to Your Soul : What Was the Beat Generation?'
In this wide-ranging anthology, Beat scholar Ann Charters brings together more than seventy-five essays, reviews, memoirs, poems, and sketches that evoke the credos and the controversies surrounding the Beat generation writers of the 1950s. Charters includes discussions of all the major Beat figures-Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder, and many more-from commentaries by the Beats themselves as well as by such writers as Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, Mary McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Wolfe, Grace Paley, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. Charters also explores the humorous side of the Beat generation, its place in post-war American culture, and the contribution of the important women authors who also wrote Beat. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Beat Face of God: The Beat Generation As Spirit Guides'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac's City'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Beat Spirit: The Way of the Beat Writers As a Living Experience'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Big Sur'
Kerouac's gritty, moving take on the destruction of his own myth, as the King of the Beats approaches middle age! Unmistakably autobiographical, Big Sur, Kerouac's ninth novel, was written as the 'King of the Beats' was approaching middle-age and reflects his struggle to come to terms with his own myth. The magnificent and moving story of Jack Duluoz, a man blessed by great talent and cursed with an urge towards self-destruction, Big Sur is at once Kerouac's toughest and his most humane work. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Book of Blues'
"In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to the other, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musicians spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of time as it waves & waves on by in measured choruses." Jack Kerouac
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Book of Dreams'
San Francisco, California, U.S.A.: City Lights Books, 1981. Book. VG. Soft cover. Reprint. Jack Kerouac's private dream record of what he saw in his sleep, "the poetic raw material of the Kerouac sage, the substrata of his novelas and commentary upon them," dedicated to "the roses of the unborn.'' [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Book of Haikus'
Highlighting a lesser-known aspect of one of America's most influential authors, this new collection displays Jack Kerouac's interest in and mastery of haiku. Experimenting with this compact poetic genre throughout his career, Kerouac often included haiku in novels, correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings. In this collection, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich supplements an incomplete draft of a haiku manuscript found in Kerouac's archives with a generous selection of Kerouac's other haiku, from both published and unpublished sources. With more than 500 poems, this is a must-have volume for Kerouac enthusiasts everywhere.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Desolate Angel - A Biography : Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation and America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beats and America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Desolation Angels'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Dharma Bums'
One of the best and most popular of Kerouac's autobiographical novels, The Dharma Bums is based on experiences the writer had during the mid-1950s while living in California, after he'd become interested in Buddhism's spiritual mode of understanding. One of the book's main characters, Japhy Ryder, is based on the real poet Gary Snyder, who was a close friend and whose interest in Buddhism influenced Kerouac. This book is a must-read for any serious Kerouac fan. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Doctor Sax and the Great World Snake'
Jack Kerouac gives free reign to the powers of his soaring imagination in this previously unpublished screenplay adaptation of his mystical, vision-novel Doctor Sax. Basing the haunting tale in true reflections of his 1930's childhood growing up in the industrial milltown of Lowell, Massachusetts. Kerouac spins out a dark cosmology as "concentrations of evil" gather -- vampires, gnomes, spiders, werewolves of the soul, "leerers at the glad heart of others" -- aspiring to destroy mankind. Doctor Sax -- alchemist of the night and friend of the children -- is the caped crusader who stands against the darkness.
Come along on an audio adventure, as young Jacky Duluoz leads you on an apocalyptic journey to confront the Wizard and the Great World Snake.
Special Multi-Media Edition includes:
- 2 CDS audio version of screenplay
- Unabridged original screenplay text
- 74 illustrations by Richard Sala
- Readers Include: . Jim Carroll . Graham Parker
. Ellis Paul . Lawrence Ferlinghetti
. Kate Pierson . Bill Janovitz
. Robert Creeley . Robert Hunter
Music by Blue Note recording artist John Medeski [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958'
They met in early 1957, eight months before the publication of On the Road made Jack Kerouac the most famous young writer in America. Some of the bitterest, saddest letters Kerouac wrote to his 21-year-old lover, Joyce Glassman, reveal the personal cost of the hysterical media attention that followed. Yet their early correspondence shows a side of Kerouac not always evident in his fiction: tender, spiritual, and supportive of Glassman's efforts to write her first novel. Now known as Joyce Johnson, she supplements the text of their epistles with commentary whose sensitive, rueful tone will be familiar to readers of her memoir, Minor Characters. The loving but independent air she assumed in her letters, Johnson notes, came from painful rewriting to eliminate all hints of hurt or need; as he wandered in and out of her life, Kerouac kept reminding her he didn't want to be tied down, even as he urged her to come visit whatever city he'd alighted in. Spiced with marvelously evocative period slang like dig and swing, and references to friends such as Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, this poignant epistolary record of a 22-month love affair also brings to life an exciting moment in American cultural history, when the Beat writers gave "powerful, irresistible voices to subversive longings." --Wendy Smith [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Good Blonde & Others'
In these uncollected writings Jack Kerouac portrays himself in his life. He hitches a ride to San Francisco with a blonde, goes on the road with photographer Robert Frank, rides bus through the Northwest and Montana, records the blues of an old Negro hobo, talks about the Beats and how it all began, gives his "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" and defends his novel The Subterraneans, compares Shakespeare and James Joyce, describes the cafeterias and subways of Manhattan, goes to a ballgame and a prize fight, and reflects on Christmas in New England, on Murnau's Nosferatu, on jazz & bop, and tells us what he's thinking about.
Table of Contents Walking to Eden
Optical Terror
The Impossible Genus
On Returning from Chiapas
Alphabets and Emperors
Optical Pleasure
Haunting by Water
Mapping Paris
The Monstrous and the Marvelous
The Death Cunt of Deep Dell
Sortilege
Books of Nature
A Dream
Manifesto in Voices
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Heaven and Other Poems'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jack Kerouac: Road Novels 1957-1960 On the Road/The Dharma Bums/The Subterraneans/Tritessa/Lonesome Traveler/From the Journals 1949-1954'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1957-1969'
Jack Kerouac Selected Letters 1957-1969 offers unparalleled insight into the life and mind of this giant of the American landscape.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1957-1969'
When Viking published the first volume of Jack Kerouac's letters in 1995, it was considered a major addition to Kerouac scholarship. The early correspondence portended the uninhibited and spontaneous prose style that would later become the author's trademark. In the second and final volume of this life-in-letters, Ann Charters, renowned Kerouac biographer and editor of The Portable Jack Kerouac, features selected letters that illuminate the latter years of this inimitable writer--the years of fame, alcohol, and disillusionment.
Written between 1957, the year of the publication of On the Road, and two days before his death in 1969 at the age of forty-seven, Kerouac's letters tell his own story through his candid and voluminous correspondence to friends and confidants--from Malcolm Cowley, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder to Joyce Johnson, John Clellon Holmes and Sterling Lord. In his letters, Kerouac explores his development as a writer, as well as revealing how the onslaught of publicity and criticism after the publication of On the Road in 1957 nearly destroyed him. Offering unparalleled insights into the mind and life of a giant of the American literary landscape, Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1957-1969 is a major addition to the understanding of the artist and his work. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kerouac'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kerouac: The Definitive Biography'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kerouac: His Life and Work'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lonesome Traveler'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Maggie Cassidy'
One of the dozen books written by Jack Kerouac in the early and mid-1950s, Maggie Cassidy was not published until 1959, after the appearance of On the Road had made its author famous overnight, Long out of print, this touching novel of adolescent love in a New England mill town, with its straight-forward narrative structure, is one of Kerouac's most accesible works. It is a remarkable , bittersweet evocation of the awkwardness and the joy of growing up in America.

› Find signed collectible books: 'Move under Ground'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Naked Angels: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs'
Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughstheir emergence in the late 1950s as the leading figures of the Beat movement marked one of the most spectacular developments in post-World War II American literature. John Tytell's classic study examines their attempt to redefine a complacent society's notion of sanity and normalcy and to reinvent their own lives through jazz, drugs, and law-breaking, acts that ultimately led to new forms of expression. A fascinating blend of literary and social criticism, history, and biography, Naked Angels is an indispensable introduction to the lives and work of these seminal figures, and an unsurpassed look at the powerful influence they had on the 1960s and beyond. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Naked Angels : The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Off the Road: My Twenty Years With Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg'
This is Carolyn Cassady's story of her life at the centre of the beat generation. In 1948, at the age of 25, she married Neal Cassady. Less than ten years after their marriage, he had become a living legend, his wild spirit immortalized in the character of Dean Moriarty, the heroic traveller in Jack Kerouac's "On The Road". Carolyn Cassady reveals how she had to compete for Neal's attention with his friends and lovers. Their marriage at first alienated poet Allen Ginsberg, who wanted Neal to himself. Even after the civil ceremony, Neal continued to see and "test" other women. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Offbeat: Collaborating With Kerouac'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On the Road'
In its time Jack Kerouac's masterpiece was the bible of the Beat Generation, the essential prose accompaniment to Allen Ginsberg's Howl . While it stunned the public and literary establishment when it was published in 1957, it is now recognized as an American classic. With On the Road , Kerouac discovered his voice and his true subject-the search for a place as an outsider in America. On the Road swings to the rhythms of fifties underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns, and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveler and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. "Life is great, and few can put the zest and wonder and sadness and humor of it on paper more interestingly than Kerouac." -Luther Nichols, San Francisco Examiner "Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the Lost Generation, so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of the Beat Generation." -Gilbert Millstein, The New York Times @Didn'tTypeOnTP! For TWITTERATURE of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, please see On the Road by Jack Kerouac. From Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Orpheus Emerged'
Recently discovered by the estate of Jack Kerouac, Orpheus Emerged chronicles the passions, conflicts, and dreams of a group of bohemians searching for truth while studying at a university. Written shortly after the iconic Beat author met Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and others in and around Columbia University, the story showcases the emerging core of the Beat Generation. Orpheus Emerged is a unique portrait of an artist as a young man and shows a writer in the process of finding the voice that would eventually express the spirit of his contemporaries. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pomes All Sizes'
The original manuscript of this book, written between 1954 and 1965, has been in the safekeeping of City Lights all the years since Kerouacs death in 1969. Reaching beyond the scope of his Mexico City Blues, here are pomes about Mexico and Tangier, Berkeley and the Bowery. Mid-fifties road poems, hymns and songs of God, drug poems, wine poems, dharma poems and Buddhist meditations. Poems to Beat friends, goofball poems, quirky haiku, and a fine, long elegy in Canuckian Child Patoi Probably Medieval . . . an English blues. But more than a quarter of a century after it was written, Pomes of All Sizes today would seem to be more than a sum of it parts, revealing a questing Kerouac grown beyond the popular image of himself as a Beat on the Road.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Portable Beat Reader'
The Portable Beat Reader is an excellent and thorough study of the Beat Generation, compiled and edited by Ann Charters, biographer of Jack Kerouac and one of our most notable experts on Beat literature and ideas. This lively work of scholarship goes deeply into the history of the Beat movement, investigating events such as the discovery (by writer William Burroughs) of the word beat to describe this literary generation. The reader includes essays on all the major prose and poetry writers, such as Allen Ginsberg, and offers rare insight into the literary-historical context of the movement. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Portable Jack Kerouac'

› Find signed collectible books: 'San Francisco Stories: Great Writers on the City'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Scripture of the Golden Eternity'
These classic Kerouac meditations, zen koans, and prose poems express the poets beatific quest for peace and joy through oneness with the universe.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Secret Scribbled Notebooks'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Some of the Dharma'
Written during a critical period of his life, "Some of the Dharma" is a key volume in Jack Kerouac's vast autobiographical canon. He began writing it in 1953 as reading notes on Buddhism intended for his friend, poet Allen Ginsberg. As Kerouac's Buddhist study and meditation practice intensified, what had begun as notes evolved into a vast and all-encompassing work of nonfiction into which he poured his life, incorporating poems, haiku, prayers, journal entries, meditations, fragments of letters, ideas about writing, overheard conversations, sketches, blues, and more. The final manuscript, completed in 1956, was as visually complex as the writing: each page was unique, typed in patterns and interlocking shapes. The elaborate form which Kerouac so painstakingly gave the book on his manual typewriter is re-created in this typeset facsimile. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Subterraneans'
In "Subterraneans" Leo and Mardou live amongst the Subterraneans who haunt the bars and clubs of San Fransisco and have a bittersweet love affair. In "Pic", on the road but not yet overawed, ten-year-old Pic tells the story in the Negro dialect of the North Carolina farm country. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Town & the City'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Tristessa'
"This entire short novel Tristessa's a narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a chihuaha dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junky lady, first in their crowded bedroom, then out to drunken streets, taco stands, & pads at dawn in Mexico City slums." Allen Ginsberg
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vanity of Duluoz'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Visions of Cody'
Kerouac's most radical experiment in language and storytelling is Visions of Cody, an "enormous paean" to that singular and influential figure Neal Cassady. A fusion of radical improvisation, bold reportate, and oracular voice, it is his ultimate version of the On the Road story. 2 cassettes. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Visions of Gerard'
"His life . . . ended when he was nine and the nuns of St. Louis de France Parochial School were at his bedside to take down his dying workds becase they'd heard his astonishing revelations of heaven delivered in catechism on no more encouragement than it was his turn to speak. . . ."
Unique among Jack Kerouac's novels, Visions of Gerard focuses on the scenes and sensations of childhoodthe wisdom, anguish, intensity, innocence, evil, insight, suffering, delight, and shockas they were revealed in the short tragic-happy life of his saintly brother, Gerard. Set in Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, it is an unsettling, beautiful, and sad exploration of the meaning and precariousness of existence.
› Find signed collectible books: 'Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954'
Jack Kerouac is best known through the image he put forth in his autobiographical novels. Yet it is only his private journals, in which he set down the raw material of his life and thinking, that reveal to us the real Kerouac. In Windblown World, distinguished Americanist Douglas Brinkley has gathered a selection of journal entries from the most pivotal period of Kerouacs life, 1947 to 1954. Here is Kerouac as a hungry young writer finishing his first novel while forging crucial friendships with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Truly a self-portrait of the artist as a young man, this unique and indispensable volume is sure to become an integral element of the Beat oeuvre.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution'
Female Beats wrote poetry, took drugs, went on the road, listened to jazz, and lived on the fringe just as the men did, but their accomplishments are not as widely recognized. This volume attempts to correct this oversight by profiling 40 women of the Beat generation and publishing samples of their work. Well-known poets Diane di Prima and Denise Levertov appear in the volume, along with the muses of male writers and other women who never became famous at all. As Brenda Knight notes in her introduction, counterculture women in the 1950s and 1960s faced difficult obstacles: "To be unmarried, a poet, an artist, to bear biracial children, to go on the road was doubly shocking for a woman, and social condemnation was high." The first portion of the anthology is devoted to women who were not Beats but who set the stage for the movement. Josephine Miles wrote poetry and mentored the younger Beat poets at Berkeley, while Madeline Gleason founded the San Francisco Poetry Festival. In the "Muses" section are short biographies of wives and girlfriends of famous male writers such as Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. It's widely known that William S. Burroughs shot his wife Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs; this book fills in other details of her wild and short life. Profiles of writers such as Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Janna McClure, and Janine Pommy Vega account for the rest of the anthology. The lives these women led are as interesting as their writing, and Women of the Beat Generation honors their determination to live outside the mainstream. --Jill Marquis [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'En el Camino'
Este libro fue la Biblia y el manifiesto de la generacion beat y se ha convertido en una novela de culto y en un clasico de la literatura norteamericana. Se narran aqui los viajes enloquecidos, a bordo de Cadillacs prestados y Dodges desvencijados, de un mitico hipster y un narrador. Esta es la cronica de unos protagonistas que fueron en la vida real: Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg y William Burroughs. [via]
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