The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who was instrumental in Kerouac's introduction to Buddhism in the mid-1950's. Two ebullient young men search for Truth the Zen way: from marathon wine-drinking bouts, poetry jam sessions, and "yabyum" in San Francisco's Bohemia, to solitude in the high Sierras and a vigil atop Desolation Peak in Washington State. The basis for the novel's semi-fictional accounts are events occurring years after the events of On the Road. The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. You can find it on Google Earth but some other people live there now. So forgive me for my four stars for Kerouac, the old bum, the old broke down disgraced beat with his typing not writing and every other reviewer on this site liking to put the boot in, and justified too, really, they're not good books - would I recommed any young person with any marbles to read nearly the whole of Kerouac's pile of typing as I myself did? NO!! Read almost anything BUT Kerouac! But my half damp eyes are staring back to that room. Life is not lived at that intensity for too many years. In those days every discovery hit like an express train and every bookshelf held high explosives. The choices multiplied and it became no longer easy to tell black from white.īack then we built a whole galaxy of heroes up from wild trips to the art house cinema to quarry Bergman or Pasolini from the granite cliffs of existentialism, or raids on libraries and second hand bookshops when we got to hear first about Kerouac and Kesey, not to mention Tolkien and Mervyn Peake, not to mention Emily Dickinson and Captain Beefheart and folk music and Alan Lomax and Alan Watts and John Fahey and Buffy Sainte-Marie. I know where each of them are to this day, but we don't see each other. That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split
It was all that easy to tell wrong from rightĪnd our choices were few and the thought never hit
With haunted hearts through the heat and coldīut our chances really was a million to one Laughin’ and singin’ till the early hours of the morn Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon Has there been a writer whose reputation has plummeted quite so much between the 70s and now as jolly Jack and his tales of merry misogynism? But like Bob Dylan saysĬoncerning myself and the first few friends I had That's a completely nostalgic four stars of course.
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