Buddhist Years

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of “one vast book,” The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven. Charles Shuttleworth is senior editor of Sal Paradise Press. As such, he edited Desolation Peak, published in 2022, which consists of Kerouac’s writing during his two-month stint as a fire lookout for the US Forest Service in the North Cascades in 1956, as well as Self-Portrait (co-edited with Paul Maher, Jr.), a blend of fiction and nonfiction spanning Kerouac’s entire adult life, from a journal written at age seventeen to autobiographical reflections a few years before his death, chosen for the consistent high quality of the writing as well as the personal revelations they contain. Shuttleworth has been teaching classes on Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation for the past thirty years, currently at the Harker School in San Jose, California.

• Citation Abbreviations and Additional Works CitedIntroductionMy Sad Sunset Birth (1941)“The Story Just Begins” (1949)"I Was Born at Five in the Afternoon" (May 1954)Reflections on Birth (from Dharma Notebooks) (1954)"Morning March 12 1922" (1954)Confessions of the Father (December 1954)First Memories (1954)The Heart of the World: The Legend of Duluoz (April 1954)The Legend of Three Houses (June 1954)The Long Night of Life (December 1954)A Dream Already Ended (Two Versions) (1954)“The Universe is empty …” (1954?)Dharma Fragments (1954)Ascetic Plans for the Future (1954)The City and the Path (April 1955)On the Path (August 1955) The Little Sutra (1955) The Blessedness Surely To Be Believed (Two Versions) (1955, 1956)Beat Generation (March 1957)Avalokitesvara (May 1957)Two 1957 Fragments (1957)Northport Sutra (September 1958)Six Poems:      Buddha's Prayer (Mexico 1957)Tao (Mexico 1957)God (Orlando 1957)The Chinese Poet (1958)Untitled "Paradise is the blissful smile" (1958)Untitled "This is the Golden Eternity" (1959) Letters to Myself (November 1960)Bed Thoughts at 3 A.M. (January 1962)NotesTranscription NotesAcknowledgments