Desolation Angels is the wild and soulful autobiographical story that covers a key year in Jack Kerouac's life-the year of the legendary road trip that led up to the publication of On the Road in 1957. Told through the persona of Jack Duluoz, who is accompanied by Kerouac's thinly disguised Beat cohorts Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs, Desolation Angels chronicles their move from isolated mountains to travels across the world. From the bars and jazz clubs of San Francisco to Mexico City, New York, Paris, London, and the opium-ridden Tangiers, Kerouac tells of their poetry, parties, mountain vigils, and spiritual contemplation in classic Kerouac fashion: with unsurpassable energy and humanity.
Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved. JACK KEROUAC was an American novelist and poet, known as a literary iconoclast, an underground celebrity, father of the Beat generation, and a progenitor of the hippie movement. Born in Massachusetts in 1922, Kerouac attended prep school in New York City on a football scholarship. In 1940, he enrolled at Columbia University, where he met Allan Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, who would become lifelong friends and seminal figures of the Beat movement. Through the 1950s, Kerouac wrote much of his work, becoming a national sensation after the publication of his most famous work, On the Road (1957), in which he used the "spontaneous prose" narrative style he created. During these years he turned to Buddhist study and practice and continued to write with his study as influence (The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans). He continued to write lesser-known novels into the 1960s, and died in 1969. Several of his works were published posthumously.
