Book of Haikus
A compact collection of more than 500 poems from Jack Kerouac that reveal a lesser known but important side of his literary legacy
“Above all, a haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi pastorella.”—Jack Kerouac
Renowned for his groundbreaking Beat Generation novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac was also a master of the haiku, the three-line, seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form. Following the tradition of Basho, Buson, Shiki, Issa, and other poets, Kerouac experimented with this centuries-old genre, taking it beyond strict syllable counts into what he believed was the form’s essence. He incorporated his “American” haiku in novels and in his correspondence,…
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…
Desolation Angels
Jack Kerouac
The Subterraneans
Jack Kerouac
Big Sur
Jack Kerouac
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
Edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford
Big Sur
Jack Kerouac
Wake Up
Jack Kerouac
On the Road: the Original Scroll
Jack Kerouac
On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition
Jack Kerouac
The Portable Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
The Dharma Bums
Jack Kerouac
Book of Sketches
Jack Kerouac; Introduction by George Condo
Windblown World
Jack Kerouac; Edited with an Introduction by Douglas Brinkley