Beat Generation
by Jack Kerouac 
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Beat Generation is a play about tension, about friendship, and about karma -- what it is and how you get it. It begins one fine morning with a few friends, honest laborers some of them, some close to being down-and-out, passing around a bottle of wine. It ends with a kind of satori-like reaffirmation of the power of friendship, of doing good through not doing, and the intrinsic worth of the throw-away little exchanges that make up our lives. Written in 1957, the same year that On the Road show more was first published, and set in 1953, Beat Generation portrays an authentic and alternate 1950s America. Kerouac's characters are working-class men and women -- a step away from vagrants, but not a big step. Their dialogue positively sings, suggesting jazz riffs in their rhythm and content, and Kerouac, like a master composer, arranges it to magical effect. Here is the heart and soul of the beat mentality, the zeitgeist that blossomed over the decades and eventually culminated in the counter-culture of 1960s America. It's a spirit that still lives. show lessTags
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Act One is a disjointed conversation over breakfast. Act Two is a disjointed conversation at a racetrack. And Act Three is a little bit less disjointed conversation about religion and Cowboys! All-in-all, it just seems like three acts of stream-of-consciousness ramblings that make very little sense. A strange play.
“... that gone turtle that swims out into infinite seas throughout eternity and comes up once in a while and sticks his head up - ...what are the chances of that turtle coming up just when the noose is over his head? trillion to one? What long odds!”
“... that gone turtle that swims out into infinite seas throughout eternity and comes up once in a while and sticks his head up - ...what are the chances of that turtle coming up just when the noose is over his head? trillion to one? What long odds!”
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213+ Works 68,442 Members
Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. His first novel, The Town and the City, was published in 1950. He considered all of his "true story novels," including On the Road, to be chapters of "one vast book," his autobiographical Legend of Duluoz. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969 at the age of forty-seven. (Publisher show more Provided) show less
Jack Kerouac has a Legacy Library. Legacy libraries are the personal libraries of famous readers, entered by LibraryThing members from the Legacy Libraries group.
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