Visions of Gerard

Title: Visions of Gerard
Author: Jack Kerouac
Fiction: 1705264
ISBN: 9780140144529
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 1991
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Edition: Reprint
Number of Pages: 144
Section: Fiction | Literary
Condition Note: Clean, unmarked copy with some edge wear. Good binding. Dust jacket included if issued with one. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.
Publisher Description: The first novella in Jack Kerouac's Duluoz Legend, detailing the writer's early life as refracted through the prism of the untimely loss of his brother

"The earliest and most heartfelt chapter of Kerouac's fictionalized autobiography."--Ann Charters

"His life . . . ended when he was nine and the nuns of St. Louis de France Parochial School were at his bedside to take down his dying words because they'd heard his astonishing revelations of heaven delivered in catechism on no more encouragement than it was his turn to speak."

Unique among Jack Kerouac's novels, Visions of Gerard captures the scenes and sensations of earliest childhood, the first four years in the life of Ti Jean Duluoz as they unfold in the short, tragic-happy life of his brother, Gerard. Set in Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, childhood's intensity, innocence, suffering, and delight unfold as Gerard interacts with animals, has visions of Our Lady in heaven, astonishes the priest in the church confessional, and observes his family as they laugh and drink and weep--that is, when he isn't sick and confined to bed.

A novel that Kerouac called "my best most serious sad and true book yet," Visions of Gerard is a beautiful, unsettling, and melancholic exploration of the meaning and precariousness of existence.