Underground. Alive

Jack Kerouac Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, 1922–1969 – a writer of an era, a paradoxical writer, who sowed the wind and did not have time to truly realize that he reaped the storm, which has not calmed even in our times. A descendant of a destitute family of French aristocrats, he became the voice of protesting American youth and introduced young American intellectuals to Buddhism. Critics arrogantly ignored him, nonconformist readers adored him. Whatever Jack the rebel wrote about, he always told - passionately and fervently - about himself and his generation. A generation that sought opportunities to break free from the habitual cozy existence of the mundane into a world of absolute and, consequently, unattainable freedom. Two very different and equally talented works by Jack Kerouac. A small and completely autobiographical novel Underground, allegedly written in just three days, about the passionate, painful love-obsession of a white guy for a black beauty, a novel filled with soul-shredding voices of jazz, streams of alcohol, and a frantic, exhausting, and reckless life of young bohemians of the 50s. And the story Alive - a tragicomic saga, written from the perspective of an unyielding boy from a southern backwater.