Big Sur: (Penguin Ink)

Written some time after his best-known works, Big Sur follows Kerouac's comedown from his carefree youth and unwanted fame, presenting his mature confrontation of some of his most troubling issues. A poignant masterpiece of wrenching personal expression from the author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums In this 1962 novel, Kerouac's alter ego Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of balance. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, Big Sur reveals consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion.