The Town and the City

by Jack Kerouac

Book Overview

"It is the sum of myself, as far as the written word can go."-- Kerouac on The Town and the City. Kerouac's debut novel is a great coming of age story which can be read as the essential prelude to his later classics.
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. The Town and the City is vividly drawn...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156907909
• ISBN13: 9780156907903
• Release Date: October 1970
• Publisher: Mariner Books Classics
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

I Love This Book

I had read virtually everything ever written by Jack, excludingthis book, because I'd heard it was his "Tom Wolf" novel and he'dyet to develop his own style...so after all these years I finallygot around to reading it...and was absolutely overwhelmed byhow great it is...so if you're a Kerouac lover and haven't readthis "family saga" yet, I can't recommend it highly enough.Other reviewers have described it well, so I'll just mention twohighlights...both in the "City" section: the first is whereLevinsky (Allen Ginsberg of course) plays head games with peopleon a New York subway car (beginning around p. 376) and the secondis this fantastic/funny/brilliant monologue about marijuana andcockroaches, (around p. 403). In a way, I'm glad I waited allthis time to finally get around to reading this wonderful novel.

If there were only six stars to give...

It is rare that I've had the feeling that I didn't want a novel to end -- this one did that to me. No exageration! -- an absolute joy for me to read! Pure magic! I've read "On the Road" a few years back which I liked a lot, but T & C...I don't know, maybe I've changed some over the years to were I appreciate more of Kerouac's passion for life and his sublime sense of existential angst that comes with it. Reading "The Town and The City" was the closest I've gotten with literature of leaving myself and going there. This book is beautiful!

Portrait of the artist as a young man.

For hipster Kerouac gurus and one-time readers of On the Road alike, The Town and the City offers a much needed pre-spotlight autobiographical perspective on an incredibly fascinating and elusive author. For those who have read much of his work, picking up T & C is like opening a time capsule and taking a peek at Picasso when he cast his first brush stroke. For those that don't understand, let me shed light. Upon the publication of On the Road (Kerouac's critically acclaimed second novel), Kerouac became a literary folk hero. His writing style for that book was experimental by his own definitions...completely on a limb from the great american novelists he lists as his influences. Where Kerouac had once been fascinated with the intricate stories of the individual and the family, he became fantastically famous for stories of expansive adventure and spastic interpersonal relationships. What many don't know is that behind the guise of the first beatnik wanderer lurks a "great american novel" of entirely different proportions. A novel tailor-made to Thomas Wolfe proportions, so much that it borrows heavily on language, style, and even historical development aspects. Read back to back with Look Homeward Angel (Wolfe), the Town and The City becomes a remarkable way spy on an artist experimenting with style and drawing upon his own childhood and library to craft something of epic proportions for a freshman effort.

Absolutely Jack

This book is a poingnant tale of the trials of life, as seen through the eyes of a boy, who watches his family changing and aging, even as he does the same. Peter Martin's reactions to everyday life are heartwrenchingly accurate. We watch his family scatter throughout the earth with the onset of WWII, and see first-hand the devastating repercussions of the war on this all-too-real household. The Town and the City was Kerouac's first novel, and what a work of literature to call your first! He was compared numerous times to Thomas Wolfe upon the first publishing, and it's no wonder. Filled with lush description and prose, this book will take your breath away and break your heart. For those who are skeptical of Kerouac's sometimes chaotic "spontaneous prose" style, fear not. While The Town and the City echoes the spontaneity of Kerouac's future works, it also contains a solid, beautiful sructure to relish and savor. Intricate layers of life intertwined so delicately they will make you cry, I promise you it will be highlighted, tattered and dogeared in a very short time. If you're looking for a book you can keep at your bedside that contains any kind of pre-sleep passage you could long for (from jubilant to forlorn, and everything in between), this is it. The Town and the City is the book you feel inside you everyday, playing out as the very essence of living itself, and the most beautiful thing of all is that it's already been written for you to enjoy again and again.