The Subterraneans

Jack Kerouac · 1958 CE · Novel · Modern / American · Contemporary

Leo Percepied, a writer drinking his way through the bars of a bohemian quarter, takes up with a young Black woman from the crowd he calls the subterraneans and narrates the affair from inside his own jealousy. Friends who want her, a stolen pushcart and his inability to bring her home to his mother wear the thing steadily down. Written in three nights and printed close to as it stood, it is the purest demonstration of the spontaneous prose method Kerouac afterwards set out for Ginsberg and Burroughs.

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