Vanity of Duluoz

Written from the vantage point of the psychedelic sixties, this fascinating, “loud-mouthed novel” (The Guardian) paints a portrait of young Kerouac, dedicated and disciplined in his determination to be an important American writer.

“The capstone of one of the most extraordinary, influential, maddening, and ultimately prodigious achievements in recent literature.”—John Clellan Holmes
 
Originally subtitled “An Adventurous Education, 1935–1946,” this is a key volume in Jack Kerouac’s lifework, the series of autobiographical novels he referred to as The Legend of Duluoz. With the same tender humor and intoxicating wordplay he brought to his masterpieces On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Vanity of Duluoz presents the formative years in the life of Jack Duluoz—Kerouac’s alter ego—beginning with his high school experiences as a sporting jock in small-town New England and his time at Columbia University on a football scholarship. Just as Jack’s glamorous new adult life begins, so does World War II, and he joins the US Navy to travel the world. The more he experiences, the more he realizes the limits of his former plans, and decides to and return to New York, where he collides with the start of the Beat movement and a riot of drugs, sex, and writing.
 
Written in 1967, Vanity of Duluoz was Kerouac’s final work published before his death in 1969.