Features the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat.

By the same author as On the Road , this book begins on a mountaintop with the author's diary of a lonely summer spent firewatching. His subsequent descent into modern America records the beginning of the feeling of futility and religious anguish that dominated the last years of his life.

Follows two young men engaged in a passionate search for dharma or truth. Their major adventure is the pursuit of the Zen way, which takes them climbing into the high sierras to seek the lesson of solitude.

This is a celebration of the life of Neal Cassady, the author's friend and inspiration. The son of a Denver drop-out, brought up homeless and motherless during the Depression, Cassady - novelized as Cody - lived his life raw, hustling in pool halls, stealing cars and living wild.

Kerouac's gritty, moving take on the destruction of his own myth, as the King of the Beats approaches middle age!

Towards the end of his life Burroughs was writing only in his journals. These are the final thoughts of one of the world's most extraordinary writers, who died in 1997, after a lifetime of notoriety - the granddaddy of the Beats, druggy, dangerous and bleak.