Maggie Cassidy

From the bard of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac''s Maggie Cassidy is an autobiographical novel of young love, published in Penguin Modern Classics.

Though publishers stopped Maggie Cassidy''s Jack Duluoz and On the Road''s Sal Paradise from sharing the same name, Kerouac meant the books to be two parts of the same life. While On the Road made Paradise (and Kerouac) a hero for generations to come of the disaffected and restless, Maggie Cassidy is an affectionate portrait of the teenager that made the man - of friendship and first love growing up in a New England mill town. Duluoz is a high school athletics and football star who meets Maggie Cassidy and begins a devoted, inconstant, tender adolescent love affair. It is one of the most sustained, poetic pieces of Kerouac''s ''spontaneous prose''.

Jack Kerouac (1922-69) was an American novelist, poet, artist and part of the Beat Generation. His first published novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957, that made Kerouac famous. Publication of his many other books followed, among them The Subterraneans, Big Sur, and The Dharma Bums. Kerouac died in Florida at the age of forty-seven.

If you enjoyed Maggie Cassidy, you might like Kerouac''s The Subterraneans and Pic, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

''A very unique cat - a French Canadian Hinayana Buddhist Beat Catholic savant'' Allen Ginsberg