Paradise Road: Jack Kerouac's Lost Highway and My Search for America
Jack Kerouac's iconic 1950s novel On the Road is a Beat Generation classic, chronicling the adventures and misadventures of Kerouac's travels crisscrossing North America with Neal Cassady, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and other colorful companions. Now gifted writer Jay Atkinson hits the road to retrace Kerouac's legendary journey today. The author's experiences offer fascinating insights on American culture and society then and now and illuminate his own quest for self-understanding and discovery.
- Contrasts the life and landscape of Kerouac's 1940s and 1950s America with the realities today
- Filled with unexpected adventures and strangers encountered on Atkinson's trips to New York, New Orleans, Chicago, Denver, Mexico City, and the California coast
- Reveals Atkinson's engaging reflections on the search for personal identity and self
- Other titles by Jay Atkinson: Ice Time (a Publishers Weekly Notable Book of the Year) and Legends of Winter Hill (a Boston Globe bestseller) as well as the novels City in Amber and Caveman Politics
Absorbing and beautifully written, Paradise Road is essential reading for Kerouac fans as well as lovers of engaging travel memoirs and anyone interested in American life and culture.
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Book details
- Author
- Jay Atkinson
- Imprint
- Trade Paper Press, an imprint of Turner Publishing Company
- Published
- Pages
- 272
- Formats
- Hardcover
- Subjects
- Biography & Autobiography › Literary Figures
- Topics
- Beat Generation · American road trip · literary travel · American culture · personal memoir · retracing historical journeys · beat poets
- ISBN-13
- 9780470237694
About the author
JAY ATKINSON is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and investigative journalist whose narrative nonfiction work Legends of Winter Hill spent seven weeks on the Boston Globe hardcover bestseller list. His books include Legends of Winter Hill, Ice Time, and Caveman Politics.
Atkinson’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Men’s Health, among other publications. Ice Time was named a Publishers Weekly Notable Book of the Year, and Caveman Politics was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program selection. He has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations.
Atkinson teaches writing at Boston University.
Jay lives in Methuen, Massachusetts.