The Subterraneans: Jack Kerouac (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Ann Douglas (Introduction), Ann Douglas (Introduction), Jack Kerouac (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2001

  $10.70

  The Subterraneans haunt the bars and clubs of San Francisco, surviving on a diet of booze and benzedrine, Proust and Verlaine. Living amongst them is Leo, an aspiring writer, and Mardou, half-Indian, half-Negro, beautiful and neurotic. Their bitter-sweet and ill-starred love affair sees Kerouac at his most evocative. Many regard this as being Kerouac's most touching and tender book.

• Used

  Paperback
  2000

  $6.45

  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 brekup 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.