- Paperback: 512 pages
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; reprint edition (Feb 1 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0156907909
- ISBN-13: 978-0156907903
- Product Dimensions: 20.2 x 13.5 x 3.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 522 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #120,855 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Product Description
In this compelling first novel, Kerouac draws on his New England mill-town boyhood to create the world of George and Marguerite Martin and their eight children, each endowed with an energy and a vision of life.
About the Author
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), was born Jean-Luis Lebris de Kerouac and grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts. A novelist and poet with eighteen books to his credit, Kerouac's unique voice is most clearly heard in his second book, On the Road, whose rebel heroes are also immortalized in Dharma Bums, Big Sur, Doctor Sax, Lonesome Traveler, and The Subterraneans. He is widely considered the preeminent prose stylist of the Beat generation.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
My Favourite Beat Angel...,
By claire.l@virgin.net (England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Town and the City (Paperback)
The Town And The City tracks the lives of the Martin family (5 sons and 3 daughters) growing up, living loving and discovering themselves, the world and others in the small town of Galloway in Massachusetts in the early 1900's. From the football star, to the lonely scholar, to the forever wandering heartbreaker of a truck driver, Kerouac deals with each of the siblings separately, describing their very different lives and in doing so, gives us the readers, a glimpse into each of their souls.The book can be read as a largely autobiographical account of Kerouac's life, with each of the Martin sons representing alternative parts of himself, his feelings, thoughts and personality. Alternatively, the reader can lose themselves in the lives of the Martin family without concerning themselves with the real or the elaborated. Kerouac reaches the reader with soaring, descriptive writing, which transform the mundane and everyday into feelings and emotions which describe the things you've always thought and felt but could never articulate into words... "He was sick now with a crying lonesomeness, he somehow knew that all moments were farewell, all life was goodbye." Kerouac himself describes the book as, "The sum of myself as far as the written word can go." The great American novel? Possibly, but this book is definately an essential for all Kerouac fans, people who have ever wondered what somebody else was thinking and all those who have raged on into the lonely night looking for an 'angelheaded hipster' to give them meaning.
4.0 out of 5 stars
You can go home again,
By
This review is from: The Town and the City (Paperback)
This semi-autobiographical work covering the life and times of Jack Kerouac before he went "On the Road" comes full circle. It begins in the small town of Galloway, Massachusettes, wends its way to the city of New York, then finally returns to Galloway. Peter Martin has a large, nurturing, and close knit family. As happens in many families, as the children grow older and become young adults, they begin to drift apart from the family unit. Peter, who achieves fame as a college football star, later tires of college and small town life, and falls captive to the lure of New York City, where he meets several bohemian types, two of whom are readily identifiable as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Francis, one of Peter's brothers, gets accepted into Harvard and falls in with a bookish, intellectual sort of man. One of the Martin sisters, Liz, decides to run off with a musician who specializes in be-bop. Added to this equation are family financial woes, a father with a gambling problem, and the start of the second world war, in which a couple of the brothers enlist in the armed services to fight the war against fascism in Europe.I have to admit that I was occasionally put off by Kerouac's tendency to over sentimentalize the events in the life of the Martin family, but what Kerouac has by and large created is a warm and loving portrait of the complex nature of family relationships. The book shows, perhaps surprisingly, that people most often have the most heatedly passionate arguments with those family members whom they most love. What especially stood out for me in this book was Peter's Galloway friendship with Alexander Panos, a particularly sensitive and emotional young Greek-American who wrote poetry. There was also a strange and very funny scene in a New York subway where Martin's Jewish-American friend utilizes a unique method to "spy" on another rider, perhaps foreshadowing the Jack Kerouac that came after _The Town and the City_.
5.0 out of 5 stars
I Love This Book,
By
This review is from: The Town and the City (Paperback)
I had read virtually everything ever written by Jack, excludingthis book, because I'd heard it was his "Tom Wolf" novel and he'd yet to develop his own style...so after all these years I finally got around to reading it...and was absolutely overwhelmed by how great it is...so if you're a Kerouac lover and haven't read this "family saga" yet, I can't recommend it highly enough. Other reviewers have described it well, so I'll just mention two highlights...both in the "City" section: the first is where Levinsky (Allen Ginsberg of course) plays head games with people on a New York subway car (beginning around p. 376) and the second is this fantastic/funny/brilliant monologue about marijuana and cockroaches, (around p. 403). In a way, I'm glad I waited all this time to finally get around to reading this wonderful novel.
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