Word: kerouacs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...your Sept. 7 article on beatnik wnting, you refer to "Jack Kerouac's soapless saga, The Subterraneans," as though in lacking soap it therefore lacked an essential ingredient. I have heard of soap operas, but I was not aware that a detergent was an essential part of a saga...
...surprising 15,000 copies. The really far-out beatniks do even better. Allen Ginsberg's effete epic, Howl, published by Ferlinghetti, is up to 40,000 copies in print, and Fantasy Records is preparing a disk of Ginsberg reading Ginsberg, including some passages too naughty to print. Jack Kerouac's soapless saga, The Subterraneans, is doing so well (over 40,000 sold, not counting paperbound reprints) that M-G-M advance agents are prowling San Francisco's Beatland for material for a film. Latest beatnik hit, published last month: a murky outpouring called Second April...
MAGGIE CASSIDY, by Jack Kerouac (189 pp.; Avon; 50?), is a sequel to Doctor Sax (TIME, May 18), the beat Boccaccio's exuberant salute to boyhood. It follows Jack Duluoz and his roughneck buddies from the time they pass puberty (timidly, as if it were a haunted house at midnight) beyond the point at which Duluoz leaves Lowell, Mass., as Kerouac did, to play football for Columbia. Both books are written in the author's customary form, which is to say, utter formlessness. But while the disjointed episodes of Doctor Sax added up-after a number of sizable...
...lengthily reported, but none of it matters much. Perhaps the trouble is that young Duluoz does not matter. As a brash, noisemaking ten-year-old, he lived in a world full of wonders; as a teenager, he seems gross and unimaginative. Maggie Cassidy was taken, like most of Kerouac's recently published books, from an apparently limitless attic filled before On the Road appeared. For the literary taxidermist, such finds can be profitable. "In the bleak, birds squeak," the Beat One interjects during a soliloquy. This specimen, with its weird vein of Gertrude Stein, should be stuffed, mounted, labeled...
...clock shadow, his habit of lying disheveled on floor or sofa, an attitude he liked to assume for photographers. "He belched in public," notes Rovere rather primly and adds: "[He had] the perverse appeal of the bum, the mucker, the Dead End kid, the James Jones-Nelson Algren-Jack Kerouac hero...