This third Library of America volume devoted to the writings of Jack Kerouac presents three powerful works, each highlighting different aspects of his turbulent life and incandescent literary gift. “My work comprises one vast book like Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past,” Kerouac wrote in a comment on Visions of Cody, “except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sick bed.” Completed in 1952, Visions of Cody was not published in full until 1972, three years after Kerouac’s death. Perhaps the most experimental of all his books, it is the other masterpiece drawn from the experiences and encounters behind On the Road, centered on an impassioned and hallucinatory portrait of his friend and idol Neal Cassady, here reimagined as Cody Pomeray. Blending the real a...
This third Library of America volume devoted to the writings of Jack Kerouac presents three powerful works, each highlighting different aspects of his turbulent life and incandescent literary gift. “My work comprises one vast book like Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past,” Kerouac wrote in a comment on Visions of Cody, “except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sick bed.” Completed in 1952, Visions of Cody was not published in full until 1972, three years after Kerouac’s death. Perhaps the most experimental of all his books, it is the other masterpiece drawn from the experiences and encounters behind On the Road, centered on an impassioned and hallucinatory portrait of his friend and idol Neal Cassady, here reimagined as Cody Pomeray. Blending the real a...