Author: Kerouac, Jack

This autobiographical novel appeared just a year after On the Road put the Beat generation on the literary map and Kerouac on the best-seller lists. Following two young men on a passionate search for dharma, or truth, from bohemian San Francisco to the high Sierras to the ascetic realm of Zen, the novel presaged - and helped to inspire - the environmental, back-to-the-land, and American Buddhist movements of the 1960s and beyond. Japhy Ryder, Kerouac's fictionalized companion, is based on poet and lifelong Buddhist Gary Snyder. 224 pp.