The Story Archive

Big Sur

Jack Kerouac · 1962 CE · Novel · Modern / American · Contemporary

Jack Duluoz, worn down by the fame that arrived with his road book and by the strangers turning up at his mother's door, borrows a publisher friend's cabin in a canyon on the California coast to dry out. Three stays there, a woman handed on to him by an old driving companion, and a fortnight of very hard drinking bring on something a hangover does not cover. It is the most exact account of alcoholic collapse in American writing, and Kerouac published it while it was still happening to him.

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