Jack Kerouac-"King of the Beats," unwitting catalyst for the '60s counterculture, groundbreaking author-was a complex and compelling man: a star athlete with a literary bent; a spontaneous writer vilified by the New Critics but adored by a large, youthful readership; a devout Catholic but aspiring Buddhist; a lover of freedom plagued by crippling alcoholism. Desolate Angel follows Kerouac from his childhood in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, to his early years at Columbia where he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, beginning a four-way friendship that became a lifelong obsession. Kerouac's frenetic cross-country journeys, experiments with drugs and sexuality, travels to Mexico and Tangier, and years of failure, frustration, and depression are recounted with detail and sensitivity. Desolate Angel is a harrowing, compassionate portrait of a man and artist set against an extraordinary social backdrop.
Giuseppe Pallavicini Caffarelli Boeken
"I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation—or, more accurately, the history of their feelings," declared Gustave Flaubert, who envisioned "a book about love, about passion; but passion such as can exist nowadays—that is to say, inactive." First published in 1869, this novel fulfills Flaubert's conception with a realistic, ironic portrait of bourgeois lives played out against France's tumultuous revolution of 1848 and the founding of its Second Empire. Frédéric Moreau, a law student in Paris, dreams of achieving success in art, business, journalism, and politics. His aspirations take a romantic turn upon a chance encounter with a married woman, who inspires a lifelong obsession. Frédéric befriends his idol's husband, an influential art dealer, and quickly finds himself seduced by society life—and bedeviled by financial problems, ideological conflicts, and betrayals of trust. Blending romance, historical authenticity, and satire, Flaubert's Sentimental Education ranks among the nineteenth century's great novels.