The Dharma Bums

‘I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s’ Bob Dylan Sal Paradise, a young innocent, joins his hero, the mystical traveller Dean Moriarty, on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs […]

A timeless travelogue from the leading light of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveller is a jubilant celebration of human discovery As he roams the US, Mexico, Morocco, Paris and London, Kerouac records, in prose of pure poetry, life on the road. Standing on the engine of a train as it rushes past fields […]

‘Kerouac’s grittiest novel … sensual and uninhibited’ The New York Times Driven mad by three years of endless telegrams, phonecalls, mail, reporters and snoopers in the wake of his hugely successful novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac, ‘King of the Beats’, needs peace, quiet and sobriety: surrounded and outnumbered he has to ‘get away to […]

In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences is considered by many to be the first work of the true crime genre. In this groundbreaking book, Truman Capote reconstructs the murder of the Clutter family from information provided by newspaper articles and interviews. ‘Dick became convinced that Perry was that […]