and 'biography?'
We got no sense of what makes the "subterranean" characters themselves; they were just shadowy shapes with alcohol problems.
A whirlwind of ideas, a maelstrom of images rushing towards the reader to allow him or her to experience the narrator's emotions and reactions. It weighs in at a little over 100 pages, but is full of love, disgust, drunkenness, excitment, and the peculiar next-day regret hangover. 1994 Apparently, this novel was written in just three days.
Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts.
Subterraneans was written in three days/nights, and its pacing reflects the rush of ideas Kerouac was having at the time--about this dark skinned woman, about drinking, about jealousy, about the ways these pieces all tore at one another. Now!" Reputedly wriI had not read any Kerouac for 30 years and saw this one in the library -written in his 'spontaneous prose' style which requires a lot of concentration to read and absorb. The following quotation from Chapter 1 illustrates the spontaneous prose style of Making a new start, starting from fresh in the rain, 'Why should anyone want to hurt my little heart, my feet, my little hands, my skin that I'm wrapt in because God wants me warm and Inside, my toes—why did God make all this so decayable and dieable and harmable and wants to make me realize and scream—why the wild ground and bodies bare and breaks—I quaked when the giver creamed, when my father screamed, my mother dreamed—I started small and ballooned up and now I'm big and a naked child again and only to cry and fear.—Ah—Protect yourself, angel of no harm, you who've never and could never harm and crack another innocent in its shell and thin veiled pain—wrap a robe around you, honeylamb—protect yourself from harm and wait, till Daddy comes again, and Mama throws you warm inside her valley of the moon, loom at the loom of patient time, be happy in the mornings.This article is about the Jack Kerouac novella.
I see a few copies of On the Road in just about every used bookstore I visit, but I wanted to read something a little shorter, just to see if I liked Kerouac or not. 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. I'll also admit that this was my first ever Kerouac, first ever Beat generation text, and first ever stream-of-consciousness text, and I'm sorry but I didn't get most of it, especially, the charm behind it all.As one of the founders of the Beat Generation, author Jack Kerouac is now ironically reaping the rewards for his works back in the 1950s and early '60s, despite his unexpected death in 1969 at the ripe age of 47.As one of the founders of the Beat Generation, author Jack Kerouac is now ironically reaping the rewards for his works back in the 1950s and early '60s, despite his unexpected death in 1969 at the ripe age of 47.I really wanted to like this book. Written in 1958, The Subterraneans is Kerouac’s attempt at a memoir about the time-honored literary theme of relationships. Somehow, though, even though this sort of melancholic epiphany seems to be common for his endings (at least in the books of his I have read), he manages to leave me with a sense of understanding, to leave me with the feeling that everything is alright. Poor grammar! I see a few copies of On the Road in just about every used bookstore I visit, but I wanted to read something a little shorter, just to see if I liked Kerouac or not.
[Jack Kerouac] ... Summary: Written over the course of three days and three nights, The Subterraneans was generated out of the same ecstatic flash of inspiration that produced another one of Kerouac's early classic, On The Road. encouraged me to find their aisle and say, simply, "I'll take it." It was recommended to me by a colleague who told me that this book is about "people who make decisions by not making any choices."
Be the first to ask a question about The Subterraneans (Paperbacks were on sale that day for a quarter.) However, like relationships, one should never take a person, or written work, at merely face value.
At that time, I had just finished Burrough's "Junky" and had just started on Ginsberg's poetry. The first thing I noticed was that the he hardly ever uses periods, making it hard to understand. The type is all bunched together and the font isn't the best. I fall in and out of love with Kerouac's prose, but his story rips your heart out. This book (more a novella than an novel)chronicles his affair with Mardou Fox (Alene Lee was her real name), a young black woman. It took me slightly longer to read it.Urban legend has it that On the Road is the primary example of Kerouac's "spontaneous prose," but the description works much better for The Subterraneans, for better and for worse.
Kerouac's writing is tender and moving; one gets the feeI really disliked this book at first. They’re both fragile psychological messes, and he’s a drunk – the affair flairs up, burns bright, and then his drunken antics and his wWritten in three nights – and, yes, for good and ill it reads that way – it boils down to the story (according to Kerouac, a true story, with the names changed and the location switched from Greenwich Village to San Francisco) of a Canuck-American writer in his early thirties in the early 1950s who falls for a ten-years younger African American “bohemian” woman. For the film, see
This book centers on the tempestous relationship of Leo and Mardou, and it was written over the course of three days and three nights. But then again, these four guys and their women/men seem to have been there and back by the close of the 1950s (on a roll of sex/drugs/bopjazz). Many … This approach may have worked, had these emoI am occasionally dizzied or nauseated by the oddest things. Welcome back. "The Subterraneans" is a book about a 3 month fling between Kerouac and a young black woman.
While some have called it racist, and others misogynistic (the Beats weren't the most enlightened guys when it came to women), I think it has to be taken as a product of its time.
The position of jazz and jazz culture is central to the novel, tying together the themes of Kerouac's writing here as elsewhere, and expressed in the "spontaneous prose" style in which he composed most of his works.