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A carregar... The Haunted Life: and Other Writingspor Jack Kerouac
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"In late 1944, under rather mysterious circumstances, aspiring writer Jack Kerouac lost a novella-length manuscript titled The Haunted Life. Set in Galloway, a fictionalized version of Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, the coming-of-age story of Peter Martin-a character based on the author's recently departed friend Sebastian Sampas-tackles the pressing issues of the day. At home in the working-class town the summer before his sophomore year at Boston College, Peter finds himself conflicted. Like many Americans, Peter is unsure, suspended between the economic crisis of the previous decade and the impending US entry into World War II. In The Haunted Life, Peter struggles to define what he believes to be intellectually true and worthy of his life and talents. Skillfully edited by Todd F. Tietchen, assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell,The Haunted Life is rounded out by sketches, notes, and reflections Kerouac kept during the novella's composition as well as a revealing selection of correspondence with his father, Leo. "-- Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — A carregar... GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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The novel The Haunted Life was intended to be in three parts; the first, "Home", is what is included here. The other two, to be titled "War" and "Change" were never written. The original manuscript, which Kerouac thought to be lost, probably in a New York taxicab in 1944, resurfaced in 2002 – supposedly it had been found in the closet of a Columbia University dorm room. This book has been edited by Todd F. Tiechen, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and he has also written an insightful introduction. In addition to obvious influences such as Thomas Wolfe, Tiechen mentions another early influence: Dostoevsky – a point Kerouac stresses in his planning documents for The Town and the City. In The Haunted Life, Peter Martin, clearly based on Jack himself, describes the "elite group" in his bookshelf: "Thoreau, Homer, the Bible, Melville's Moby Dick, Ulysses, Thomas Wolfe, Shakespeare, Whitman, Faust, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy."
It is no coincidence that his first published book was titled The Town and the City - in a note, "Some Town and City Conclusions" (1948), also included among the Sketches in this book, he writes: "A form of masochism, (or love of helplessness,) and something that resembles impetuosity of a sort seems to make the most conclusive evidence connected with what I have been calling "intellectual decadence." This, which occurs in modern City-Centers in America, along with the crowded, harried, unhealthy, brutal life of the City-Center in general (...) The masochism occurs in various forms but springs up from the same patterned depths, the same psychology, the same "character structure," or if not that Reichian term, at least, the same character dissolution. It concerns a real fall from manliness. I mean this in the most direct sense. And concurrently, in women, it concerns a real fall from womanliness, again in the most direct sense. It renders the man helpless in the real situations of real life, that is, a kind of primary life which is arbitrarily sluffed over by convenient City-forms that can’t and never will last. (...) Since the American idea is a will-idea above all things, the mere fact that helplessness and will-lessness enters into our City-Centers is a dangerous fact indicating a decline of character and just guts in a generation." – It is also no wonder that he kept returning to Lowell, Massachusetts in his writings.
If you are going to read The Town and the City, this book is the obvious place to start. And if not, I recommend it anyway.
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