Lonely Wanderer. Tristessa. Satori in Paris

Jack Kerouac Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, 1922–1969 – a writer of an era, a paradoxical writer, who sowed the wind and did not manage to truly realize that he reaped the storm, which has not calmed down even in our times. Coming from a poorer family of French aristocrats, he became the voice of the protesting American youth and introduced young American intellectuals to Buddhism. Critics arrogantly ignored him, while nonconformist readers carried him on their shoulders. Whatever Jack the rebel wrote about, he always narrated – ecstatically and passionately – about himself and his generation. A generation seeking every possible way to break free from the habitual, bourgeois, cozy existence into a world of absolute and, consequently, unattainable freedom. And in this context, it no longer matters what he will tell this time – the story of his complicated relationship with a night butterfly from Mexico City or about the journey from Paris to Brittany, because all this is a chronicle or, if you will, a chronicle of the beat generation. Brilliant losers who challenged forces that cannot be defeated – and, of course, lost, but lost so talentfully and brightly that such a defeat is worth a different victory.