Written during a critical period of his life, this volume details the spiritual underpinnings of Jack Kerouac’s work—“not only [his] most intimate effort, but among his most vibrant, recording the pattern of his thoughts in a way that . . . brings them powerfully, inconvertibly to life (Newsday). “Kerouac’s work represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation.”—The New York Times Book Review While his masterpiece On the Road languished on the desks of unresponsive editors, Kerouac turned to Buddhism, and in 1953 began writing reading notes on the subject intended for his friend Allen Ginsberg. As his Buddhist study and meditation practice intensified, what had begun as notes evolved into a vast, all-encompassing work of nonfiction into which he poured his life, incorporating poems, haiku, prayers, journal entries, fragments of letters, ideas about writing, sketches, 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 that Kerouac so painstakingly gave his books is recreated in this typeset facsimile.
Passionate, playful, ecstatic, filled with humor, insight, beautiful language, sorrow, and struggle, Some of the Dharma is a far-ranging and extremely revealing work.
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.
