Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac
About this audiobook
The classic and fascinating story of Jack Kerouac, "King of the Beats" and American literary legend, recorded through the voices of his friends and lovers. Authors Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee retraced Kerouac's life at home and on the road and talked with the prophets, musicians, poets, socialites, and working people who knew him. Some are famous (Allen Ginsberg, Gore Vidal, William Burroughs); some are not (Jack's boyhood buddies, his lovers, his barroom companions). All have contributed to a remarkably vibrant, riveting portrait of a life. We see Jack at Columbia University and on the scene of Greenwich Village; speeding across the tarmac of America with Neal Cassidy ('Dan Moriarty' in Kerouac's classic novel, On the Road); at home with his possessive mother; in California, drinking wine and talking Buddhism; and finally, in Florida, where his life ends tragically at forty-seven years old. Jack's Book, like Kerouac's novels, makes a unique contribution to our understanding of a man and a generation that shaped the dreams and visions of those who followed.
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About the author
Barry Gifford is a celebrated writer whose novels have been translated into twenty-five languages. He has received awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Writers Guild of America, and his novel Wild at Heart was turned into a film by David Lynch.
Lawrence Lee, a Peabody Award–winning journalist, worked for UPI, AP, and a number of television stations in San Francisco. He coauthored, with Barry Gifford, Saroyan: A Biography. Mr. Lee died in 1990.
Mauro Hantman is a graduate of RISD and the Trinity Rep Conservatory who has performed at the Rhode Island Shakespeare Theater, the Sandra Feinstein Gamm Theatre, the Actor's Theatre of Louisville, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He also has performed and taught around the country as an improviser.
