Tristessa

by Jack Kerouac, Aram Saroyan (Foreword by)

Overview

Each book by Jack Kerouac is unique, a telepathic diamond. With prose set in the middle of his mind, he reveals consciousness itself in all its syntatic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion. Such rich natural writing is nonpareil in later half XX century, a synthesis of Proust, Céline, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Genet, Thelonius Monk, Basho, Charlie Parker, and Kerouac's own athletic sacred insight.

"This entire short novel Tristessa's a narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a chihuaha dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junky lady, first in their crowded bedroom, then out to drunken streets, taco stands, & pads at dawn in Mexico City slums." —Allen Ginsberg"

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101548776
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/01/1992
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	288 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Tristessa:

"[I]t is always a pleasure to read a Jack Kerouac novel . . . The true importance of Kerouac is that he rekindled the Super-Romantic tradition at a time when it needed rekindling. He is a born writer . . . He loves language, and he obviously has a profound feeling for the human race . . . In the end he is more truthful, entertaining and honest than most writers on the American scene." —The New York Times Book Review

"We've just got to realize that we've got a great writer on our hands. This time we are getting the innocent lost heart straight." —San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher