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Big Sur, first published in 1962, was written by author and poet Jack Kerouac in the fall of 1961 over a ten-day period. This Penguin edition reprint recounts Kerouac's (here known by the name of his fictional alter-ego Jack Duluoz) three brief stays at a cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur, California, owned by Kerouac's friend and Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The novel depicts Jack Duluoz's mental and physical deterioration. Despite his mainstream success with his earlier novels, Duluoz is unable to cope with his new-found fame and advancing alcoholism. He attempts to recover first in solitude in the cabin at Big Sur, and later in a relationship with Billie, the mistress of his long-time friend Cody Pomeray (in real life Neal Cassady). Duluoz is driven by loneliness to return to the city and resumes drinking heavily. An addendum to the book contains a free-verse poem by Kerouac: "Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur", written from the perspective of the Pacific Ocean. A film adaptation of Big Sur, directed by Michael Polish, was released in 2013.
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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.
