Mexico City Blues
  • Published: 17 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241388945
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

Mexico City Blues

Formats & editions
Paperback
17 Sep 2019
EBook
4 Jul 2019
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Kerouac's famed freewheeling poem joins the Penguin Modern Classics

'I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday'

Freewheeling and spontaneous, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac's most significant and emblematic poem. Consisting of 242 loosely linked 'choruses', it takes in life, death, spirituality, jazz improvisation, memory, fantasies and dreams, all infused with the rhythm of the blues, to create a surreal and all-encompassing epic.
  • Published: 17 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241388945
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

About the author

Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. In 1947, enthused by bebop, the rebel attitude of his friend Neal Cassidy, and the throng of hobos, drug addicts and hustlers he encountered in New York, he decided to discover America and hitchhhike across the country. His writing was openly autobiographical and he developed a style he referred to as 'spontaneous prose' which he used to record the experiences of the Beat Generation. Among his many novels are On the Road, Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums and Big Sur. He died in 1969.

Also by Jack Kerouac

On the Road
Piers of the Homeless Night
Visions of Gerard
Pic
Tristessa
The Unknown Kerouac (LOA #283)
The Haunted Life
See all

Praise for Mexico City Blues

A spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature.

Allen Ginsberg

A jazz poet. His sentences frequently move into tempestuous sweeps and whorls and sometimes they have something of the rich music of Gerard Manley Hopkins of Dylan Thomas.

The New York Herald Tribune
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