Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920 and then published in its entirety in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce's 40th birthday. It is considered to be one of the most important works of modernist literature and has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement." According to Declan Kiberd, "Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking".
Beatnik was a media stereotype prevalent throughout the 1950s to mid-1960s that displayed the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s. Elements of the beatnik trope included pseudo-intellectualism, drug use, and a cartoonish depiction of real-life people along with the spiritual quest of Jack Kerouac's autobiographical fiction.
The Beat Generation was a literary movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
Neal Leon Cassady was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic and counterculture movements of the 1960s.
Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary was an Anglo-Irish novelist.
The Subterraneans is a 1958 novella by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. It is a semi-fictional account of his short romance with Alene Lee (1931–1991), an African-American woman, in Greenwich Village, New York. Kerouac met Alene in the late summer of 1953 when she was typing up the manuscripts of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, in Allen's Lower East Side apartment.
In the novella, Kerouac moved the story to San Francisco and renamed Alene Lee "Mardou Fox". She is described as a carefree spirit who frequents the jazz clubs and bars of the budding Beat scene of San Francisco. Other well-known personalities and friends from the author's life also appear thinly disguised in the novel. The character Frank Carmody is based on William S. Burroughs, and Adam Moorad on Allen Ginsberg. Even Gore Vidal appears as successful novelist Arial Lavalina. Kerouac's alter ego is named Leo Percepied, and his long-time rival Neal Cassady is mentioned only in passing as Leroy.
Queer is an early short novel by William S. Burroughs. It is partially a sequel to his earlier novel, Junkie, which ends with the stated ambition of finding a drug called Yage. Queer, although not devoted to that quest, does include a trip to South America looking for the substance.
Doctor Sax is a novel by Jack Kerouac published in 1959. Kerouac wrote it in 1952 while living with William S. Burroughs in Mexico City.
Mexico City Blues is a poem published by Jack Kerouac in 1959 composed of 242 "choruses" or stanzas. Written between 1954 and 1957, the poem is the product of Kerouac's spontaneous prose, his Buddhism, and his disappointment at his failure to publish a novel between 1950's The Town and the City and 1957's On the Road.
Ann Charters, née Ann Ruth Danberg is a professor of American Literature at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.
Jerry Yulsman was an American novelist and a photographer best known for his photographs of Jack Kerouac, notably the cover illustration on Joyce Johnson's memoir Minor Characters.
Old Angel Midnight is a long narrative poem by American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac. It was culled from five notebooks spanning from 1956 to 1959, while Kerouac was fully absorbed by his studies of Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy. Kerouac initially experimented with Old Angel Midnight in 1953 in his diary titled "1953. Notes again." In entries dated from November 20 to December 3, 1953, he made notes on "Lucien Midnight" which was to be originally conceptualized in what he called "book movie" form, when he closed his eyes and projected onto paper a cinematic sense of what he heard. A bookmovie, he explained in Some of the Dharma, is a "prose concentration camera-eye visions of a definite movie of the mind with fade-ins, pans, close-ups, and fade-outs." Kerouac's notes on Lucien Midnight were written while staying in the Lower East Side where he initially heard sounds coming through a tenement window from the wash court below. He then heard voices coming from kitchens of the other occupants in nearby apartment buildings and a man named Paddy arriving home drunk, and even a junky stirring in his bed. Kerouac conceptualized an idea of developing a work based on James Joyce’s experimental novel Finnegans Wake where the “sounds of the universe” became the chief “plot” with all of its associated “neologisms, mental associations, puns and wordmixes” that stewed a plethora of languages and “nonlanguages.” Kerouac determinedly “scribbled out in a strictly intuitional discipline at breakneck speed” the fledgling prose that would finally comprise the finished book for City Lights's Pocket Poet series eight years later. Kerouac's one dogma was to compose Lucien Midnight strictly in pencil by candlelight. Lucien Midnight differs from his sketching method of writing because it is based upon an aural experience, and not visual. The bookmovie approach was abandoned in 1953 in favor of a different approach he had stylistically achieved by 1956.
Jack Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel.
The Jack Kerouac Writers in Residence or Kerouac Project is a registered 501(c)(3) non profit group in Orlando, Florida. The project provides aspiring writers to live in the house that Jack Kerouac lived in while writing his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, rent free for 3 months.
Justin W. Brierly (1905–1985) was an American educator and lawyer. He was a prominent member of Denver, Colorado society, noted for his efforts to place students into prominent universities, and as a patron of the performing arts. He is also remembered for his association with Beat Generation icons Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac.
The Sea Is My Brother is a novel by the American author Jack Kerouac, published in 2011. The novel was written in 1942 and remained unpublished throughout Kerouac's lifetime due to his dissatisfaction with the novel. The plot and its characters are based on Kerouac's experience in United States Merchant Marine during World War II.
Beatrice (Bea) Kozera was an American born woman, farm worker and single mother. She was the inspiration for the character "Terry" in Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel, On the Road. In fact, it was this story, "The Mexican Girl," that opened the doors for the publication of "On the Road." The book was later the subject of a 2012 film adaptation of the same name produced by Francis Ford Coppola in which she was marginally portrayed by Alice Braga. Until 2013, her life story was unknown until author Tim Z. Hernandez began to search for her in 2008 and discovered her alive in his hometown of Fresno, California in 2010. Together with Kozera and her family he wrote the book Mañana Means Heaven. It is the only account of Bea Kozera’s story that was authorized by the family.
