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Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46 by Jack Kerouac
Book Summary InformationAuthor: Jack Kerouac Edition: Paperback Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published) Published: 1994-06-01 ISBN: 0140236392 Number of pages: 268 Publisher: Penguin Books
Book Reviews of Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46Book Review: Beat Generation - The Prequel Summary: 5 Stars
Kerouac's last real novel, this gives you some idea of where he was coming from in the years before he sat down to write On the Road and the other books that would define the Beat Generation.
As a reader, I came at Kerouac back to front, coming across this as a teenager in the local library when it had just come out in 1969. I was a high school senior, a small town quarterback, a secretly aspiring writer, living in a Massachusetts mill town and struggling with the constraints of the Roman Catholic faith.
At one point in this book, the narrator tells his father he is leaving town because he doesn't want to rot in Lowell and his father tells him "You don't know it, but you're rotting in Lowell right now."
This book, maybe more than anything he wrote except On the Road, has always stayed with me. I never lost sight of where he was coming from with his rebellion.
In my opinion, contrary to some other reviews here, it is not a bad place to start with Jack.
Summary of Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46Originally subtitled "An Adventurous Education, 1935-1946," Vanity of Duluoz is a key volume in Jack Kerouac's lifework, the series of autobiographical novels he referred to as The Legend of Duluoz. With the same tender humor and intoxicating wordplay he brought to his masterpieces On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Kerouac takes his alter ego from the football fields of small-town New England to the playing fields and classrooms of Horace Mann and Columbia, out to sea on a merchant freighter plying the sub-infested waters of the North Atlantic during World War II, and back to New York, where his friends are the writers who would one day become known as the Beat generation and where he published his first novel. Written in 1967 from the vantage point ot the psychedelic sixties, Vanity of Duluoz gives a fascinating portrait of the young Kerouac, dedicated and disciplined in his determination from an early age to be an important American writer.
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