Subterraneans

From the most famous of the Beat writers and the author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s intoxicating love story of two young bohemians

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 romance and breakup 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. Loosely based on Kerouac’s own life, and peopled with analogues of real-life friends, including William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady, The Subterraneans is a vivid and breathless masterwork of Beat literature.

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. He won a scholarship to Columbia University, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. On the Road, published in 1957, epitomized to the world what became known as the ＂Beat generation＂ and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969.