Big Sur

Name: Big Sur
Brand: Blackstone Audiobooks
Availability: InStock
Author: Jack Kerouac
ISBN: 9781441711526

Author: Jack Kerouac

Narrator: Grover Gardner

Unabridged: 5 hr 44 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Published: 01/01/2007

Categories: Fiction, Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Coming down from his carefree youth and unwanted fame, Jack Kerouac undertakes a mature confrontation of some of his most troubling emotional issues: a burgeoning problem with alcoholism, addiction, fear, and insecurity. He dutifully records his everchanging states of consciousness, which culminate in a powerful religious experience.Big Sur was written some time after Jack Kerouac's bestknown works, following a visit to northern California and the first feelings of midlife crisis. Kerouac stayed for several weeks in a cabin in Big Sur, California, and with friends in San Francisco. Upon returning home, he wrote this account in a twoweek period. Critic Richard Meltzer referred to Big Sur as Kerouac's "masterpiece, and one of the great, great works of the English language."

About Jack Kerouac

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Leile on May 16, 2007

Kerouac's last stand, for all intents and purposes. The Beat Legend is in top form here, as he describes as best as we could ask him to the sickness and insanity that plagued his final years, shortly after the publication of On the Road. We watch in horror and sometimes sick fascination as his mind......more

Goodreads review by Dave on June 25, 2022

Forgive me for this ramble in the kinda sorta manner of. . . ohmygodno I did not want to read this book right now, I really did not. I am in the middle of reading the later books of the recently departed Philip Roth, unflinchingly facing decay and death, and I had to drive a few hours in a car and I......more

Goodreads review by P.E. on January 12, 2025

This Too Shall Pass In Big Sur, we follow the geographical and mental wanderings of the famous writer Jack Duluoz, the hero of the Duluoz Legend, as he agrees to travel across the States from NY to CA and settle for some time in a cabin located in the Big Sur Area, along the Central part of the Calif......more

Goodreads review by Karen on December 20, 2024

Catching up… Living where I do, not too far off of Hwy 1, on the beautiful Central Coast of California, I am fortunate to see the ocean as part of my every day walks with my husband and corgi dogs. I know how lucky I am as I take in sounds of the waves crashing onto the sand, or feeling my feet in th......more

Goodreads review by Matthew Ted on April 16, 2020

I like who I am when I read Kerouac, I love all the trees that go by on this train I’m on right now and I love all the sky that’s up above and the sun, its wide rays across all these fields and then the sun when it goes all sharp and pricks through the trees – And right now I’m forgiving everyone I’......more