Big Sur - Kerouac, Jack

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Résumé :
Jack Kerouac shot to literary fame in 1957 with the publication of his iconic book of the Beat Generation, On the Road. Kerouac was termed King of the Beats, a mantle he was entirely uncomfortable with. Along with Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and several others forged a new literary voice and attitude - it was a movement that often mocked and challenged the American status quo. Prior to the publication of On the Road, Kerouac had written several novels and poems. With the almost overnight success of On the Road, publishers clamored for his other books and a Kerouac industry was born. Within only a few years of being heralded as the voice of a new generation, however, Kerouac was aging, severely alcoholic, and suffering from a death of the spirit. Arguably his finest post-On the Road novel, Big Sur captures Kerouac (here named Jack Duluoz) trying to escape the clamor of beatnik adulation by retreating to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's peaceful cabin in Big Sur. What begins as a pastoral regeneration descends into a personal hell when Kerouac suffers an alcoholic breakdown. Written in Kerouac's elegantly poetic and rapid-fire prose, Big Sur is both beautiful and horrific, a clear-eyed recollection of facing down his many demons and willing himself to survive them.

Biographie:
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.

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