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Mexico City Blues

Mexico City Blues

by Jack Kerouac

“Each book by Kerouac is unique, a telepathic discord. Such rich, natural writing is nonpareil in the later twentieth century.” –Allen Ginsberg

Paperback
E-Book

Imprint Grove Paperback
Page Count 256
Publication Date June 01, 1970
ISBN-13 978-0-8021-3060-0
Dimensions 5.38" x 8.25"
US List Price $16.00

Imprint Grove Paperback
ISBN-13 978-0-8021-9568-5
US List Price $16.00

Jack Kerouac, the father of the Beat Generation, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. He attended Columbia University, briefly, on a football scholarship, but an injury forced him to quit after his freshman season. After dropping out of university, Kerouac continued to live in New York City, where he would meet Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs, the future stars of the Beat Generation. Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City, was published in 1950 and received little attention, but it was the publication of his second novel, On the Road (1957), that would ultimately win him literary celebrity. He is the author of On the Road, The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, Lonesome Traveler, Desolation Angles, Dr. Sax, and Mexico City Blues, as well as the co-author with William S. Burroughs of the previously unpublished novel And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Kerouac died of an internal hemorrhage, in 1969.
Read More About Jack Kerouac

About The Book

Kerouac’s most important poem, Mexico City Blues, incorporates all the elements of his theory of spontaneous composition. Memories, fantasies, dreams, and surrealistic free association are all lyrically combined in the loose format of the blues to create an original moving epic.

Tags American/General

Praise

“The first clear development of the American Romantic prose since Hemingway, Kerouac’s writing is full of mad sex, comedy, widescreen travel writing, and long lyrical evocations of American childhood and adolescent memories.” –The Times (London)

“Kerouac’s work represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation.” –Ann Douglas

“Each book by Kerouac is unique, a telepathic discord. Such rich, natural writing is nonpareil in the later twentieth century.” –Allen Ginsberg

An outsider in America, Jack Kerouac was a true original.” –Ann Charters

Excerpt

STRONG>1st Chorus
Butte Magic of Ignorance
Butte Magic
Is the same as no-Butte
All one light
Old Rough Roads
One High Iron
Mainway

Denver is the same

“The guy I was with his uncle was
the governor of Wyoming”
“Course he paid me back”
Ten Days
Two Weeks
Stock and Joint

“Was an old crook anyway”

The same voice on the same ship
The Supreme Vehicle
S. S. Excalibur
Maynard
Mainline
Mountain
Merudvhaga
Mersion of Missy

2nd Chorus
Man is not worried in the middle

Man in the Middle
Is not Worried
He knows his Karma
Is not buried

But his Karma,
Unknown to him,
May end –

Which is Nirvana
Wild men
Who kill
Have Karmas
Of ill

Good men
Who love
Have Karmas
Of dove

Snakes are Poor Denizens of Hell
Have come surreptitioning
Through the tall grass
To face the pool of clear frogs

3rd Chorus
Describe fires in riverbottom
sand, and the cooking;
the cooking of hot dogs
spitted in whittled sticks
over flames of woodfire
with grease dropping in smoke
to brown and blacken
the salty hotdogs,
and the wine,
and the work on the railroad.

$275,000,000,000.00 in debt
says the Government
Two hundred and seventy five billion
dollars in debt
Like Unending
Heaven
And Unnumbered Sentient Beings
Who will be admitted –
Not-Numberable –
To the new Pair of Shoes
Of White Guru Fleece
O j o!
The Purple Paradise

Copyright ” 1959 by Jack Kerouac. Reprinted with permission from Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.