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  • Published: 4 April 2006
  • ISBN: 9780143036067
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $35.00

Windblown World

The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954



Selections from Jack Kerouac’s journals of the late 1940s and early 1950s – the raw material for what became his classic novel On the Road
 
September 5, 2017, marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of On the Road

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 Kerouac’s 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.

  • Published: 4 April 2006
  • ISBN: 9780143036067
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $35.00

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.

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