Summary
Jack Kerouac: The Lonely Traveler
The Lonely Traveler, a collection of diaries and stories recorded during travels in the late 1940s and 1950s, was first published in 1960. As the years passed, as Kerouac's experience changed, so did his free style. At the beginning, brash, thoughtless, frivolous, frenetic, over time it becomes poetic, self-reflexive, extremely picturesque and associative reflection of very personal experiences of the world, its beauty and own pain. These texts fully reflect the writer's inner and literary maturation. Wandering through the United States and Mexico, then Morocco and Europe, through Paris and London, Kerouac races by train past fields of prickly cacti; witnesses his first bullfight in Mexico while drugged with opium; catches up with the rhythm of New York nightlife; it blends with the snow-capped mountains of the American Northwest; meditates on a sunny rooftop in Tangier; he falls in love with Montmartre and the huge white Basilica of the Sacred Heart. Page after page, Kerouac reveals the endless variety of human life and his own exuberant philosophy of self-fulfillment. As befits the leader of the beat generation, Kerouac's great celebration of the human revelation of life ends with an essay about the American tramp, the last truly free man.
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