From the acclaimed Beat Generation author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums come eight extended poems in which he reflects on the urban settings he finds himself in. Best known for his novels, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In these poems, Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues and jazz forms that he used in another book of poems, Mexico City Blues.

Originally published in 1965, this autobiographical novel covers a key year in Jack Kerouac’s life—the period that led up to the publication of On the Road in September of 1957. After spending two months in the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington, Kerouac’s fictional self Jack Duluoz comes down from the isolated mountains to the wild excitement of the bars, jazz clubs, and parties of San Francisco, before traveling on to Mexico City, New York, Tangiers, Paris, and London.

A long poem in Kerouac’s freewheeling and spontaneous improvisational style, Mexico City Blues is a unique epic of sound, rhythm, and religion. Called superb sensory meditations, the poetry takes in life, death, and spirituality but roams widely across continents and cultures. Memories, fantasies, dreams, and surrealistic free association are all lyrically combined in the loose format inspired by jazz and the blues.

While his masterpiece On the Road languished on the desks of unresponsive editors, Kerouac turned to Buddhism, and in 1953 began writing reading notes on the subject intended for his friend Allen Ginsberg.

In his first autobiographical work, Jack Kerouac reveals exhilarating stories of the years he spent traveling, while writing his acclaimed novels. His journeys took him from California deserts crisscrossed by train tracks to the bullfights of Mexico to the Beat nightlife of New York City and across the Atlantic to Paris, Morocco, and London. He also writes about relationship, jobs, and the nature of life on the road. Here are echoes of landscapes that appear in some of his novels, including The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels.

Written over the course of three days and three nights, The Subterraneans was generated out of the same kind of ecstatic flash of inspiration that produced another one of Kerouac’s early classics, On the Road. Centering around the tempestuous romance and breakup of Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox—two denizens of the 1950s San Francisco underground—The Subterraneans is a tale of dark alleys and smoky rooms, of artists, visionaries, and adventurers existing outside mainstream America’s field of vision.

Written seven years before The Town and the City officially launched his writing career, The Sea Is My Brother marks the pivotal point at which Kerouac began laying the foundations for his pioneering method and signature style. The novel chronicles the misadventures of two seamen who at first seem different but are really two sides of the same coin: 27-year-old Wesley Martin, who “loved the sea with a strange, lonely love,” and William Everhart, an assistant professor of English at Columbia College.

This is a story of philosophy, identity, and the powerful grip of travel, written by an iconic American author at the height of his fame, after spending ten days in France searching for his French heritage. Was the satori handed to him by a taxi driver, a waiter, a monsieur with a dazzlingly beautiful secretary, or while feeling fearful in the foggy streets at 3:00 a.m.? Or was it when hearing a requiem by Mozart in an old church, seeing trees in the Tuileries Garden, or while walking on a bridge over the River Seine?

Few novels have had as profound an impact on American culture as On the Road. Pulsating with the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open road, Kerouac’s classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be “beat” and has inspired generations of writers, musicians, artists, poets, and seekers who cite their discovery of the book as the event that “set them free”.

Jack Kerouac’s archive is vast. Throughout his life he was constantly writing, and he meticulously saved and catalogued his material. The result is that beyond the work published in his lifetime there has been a rich stream of posthumous writing that is far from tapped. This collection of previously unpublished writing culled from the Kerouac archive, and as a companion to Paul Maher Jr.'s Becoming Kerouac, spans Kerouac’s adult life, from a journal written at age seventeen to autobiographical reflections a few years before his death.