Mexico City Blues - by Jack Kerouac (Paperback)

About the Book

Jack Kerouac, who died in 1969 at the age of forty-seven, is renowned as the father of the beat generation. His eighteen internationally acclaimed books -- including On the Road, Doctor Sax, The Subterraneans, and Lonesome Traveler -- were important signpost in a new American literature. Here, in Mexico City Blues, his only collection of poetry, his voice is as distinctive as in his prose; it roams widely across continents and cultures in a restless search for meaning and expression, giving the verse the unique qualities found in America's most distinctive contribution to music.

Book Synopsis

One of the renowned Beat writer's most formally inventive books, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac's essential work of lyric verse, now reissued following his centenary celebration

Written between 1954 and 1957, and published originally by Grove Press in 1959, Mexico City Blues is Kerouac's most important verse work. It incorporates all the elements of his theory of spontaneous composition and his interest in Buddhism. Memories, fantasies, dreams, and surrealistic free association are lyrically combined in the loose format inspired by jazz and the blues. Written while Kerouac was living in Mexico City, and with references to William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Bill Garver, this exciting book in Kerouac's oeuvre is an original and moving epic of sound, rhythm, and religion.

Review Quotes

Praise for Mexico City Blues:

"A great masterpiece, a singing religious poem."-Michael McClure

"A series of improvisations, notes, a shorthand of perceptions and memories, having in large part the same kind of word-play and rhythmic invention to be found in his prose."--Robert Creeley, Poetry

"What seems to me to emerge at the end is a voice of remarkable kindness and gentleness, an engaging and modest good humor and a quite genuine spiritual simplicity."--Anthony Hecht, Hudson Review

Praise for Jack Kerouac:

"The first clear development of the American Romantic prose since Hemingway, Kerouac's writing is full of mad sex, comedy, widescreen travel writing, and long lyrical evocations of American childhood and adolescent memories."--Times (UK)

"Kerouac's work represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation."--Ann Douglas

"Each book by Kerouac is unique, a telepathic discord. Such rich, natural writing is nonpareil in the later twentieth century."--Allen Ginsberg

"An outsider in America, Jack Kerouac was a true original."--Ann Charters

About the Author

JACK KEROUAC was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. He won a scholarship to Columbia University, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. On the Road, published in 1957, epitomized to the world what became known as the "Beat generation" and made Kerouac one of the best-known writers of his time. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969.