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The Times & The Sunday Times
The Times & The Sunday Times
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Big Sur

The Times
The Times

About the author

Jack Kerouac was born in Massachusetts in 1922 and died in Florida in 1969. He is best known for On the Road, the fictionalised autobiography and Beat classic, written in 1951 and published in 1957.

About the book

Written as the “King of the Beats” was approaching middle age, Big Sur reflects Jack Kerouac’s struggle to come to terms with his own myth. The magnificent and moving story of a man blessed by great talent but cursed with an urge for self-destruction, Big Sur is at once Kerouac’s toughest and most humane work.

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In his own words it is “the first trip I’ve taken away from home since the publication of On the Road, the book that made me famous, so much so that I realised that I was surrounded and outnumbered and had to get away to solitude again or die”.