Beat Generation - Tapa dura

This is Jack Kerouac's great lost work, a play written in 1957, the same year that On the Road was first published. Beat Generation is about tension, about friendship, and about karma – what it is and how you get it. It begins in New York's Bowery, with wine in the morning, and ends with questions of the form of the world. From money and the need for it, to religion and the karma of Christ, to the mysteries and wisdom of life reflected in horseracing, Kerouac touches on the essentials of Beat mentality, the rejection of middle class values and the expansion of consciousness.

With the same biting wit and honest as Kerouac's novels, Beat Generation portrays an authentic and alternate 1950s America. Kerouac's characters are working-class men—a step away from vagrants, but not a big step. His dialogue suggests spontaneous jazz riffs in its rhythm and restless philosophy in its content. Here is the genuine heart and soul of the zeitgeist that blossomed into the counter-culture of 1960s America and lives in restless spirits today.

'I remember being awed by him and amazed by him' -- Alan Ginsberg

'What are writers trying to do? They are trying to create a universe in which they have lived or would like to live. To write they must go there and submit to conditions they may not have bargained for. Sometimes, as in the case of Kerouac, the effect produced by a writer is immediate, as if a generation were waiting to be written.' --William S. Burroughs

'Kerouac came roaring down each highway like a man possessed...Moving on not from a sense of disenchantment, but with a voracious and insatiable hunger for experience.' --Lester Bangs

'I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's' --Bob Dylan