Maggie Cassidy

<p>From the bard of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac's <i>Maggie Cassidy </i>is an autobiographical novel of young love, published in Penguin Modern Classics. <p>Though publishers stopped <i>Maggie Cassidy's</i> Jack Duluoz and <i>On the Road's</i> Sal Paradise from sharing the same name, Kerouac meant the books to be two parts of the same life. While <i>On the Road</i> made Paradise (and Kerouac) a hero for generations to come of the disaffected and restless, <i>Maggie Cassidy</i> 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'. <p>Jack Kerouac (1922-69) was an American novelist, poet, artist and part of the Beat Generation. His first published novel, <i>The Town and the City</i>, appeared in 1950, but it was <i>On the Road</i>, published in 1957, that made Kerouac famous. Publication of his many other books followed, among them <i>The Subterraneans</i>, <i>Big Sur</i>, and <i>The Dharma Bums</i>. Kerouac died in Florida at the age of forty-seven. <p>If you enjoyed <i>Maggie Cassidy</i>, you might like Kerouac's <i>The Subterraneans and Pic</i>, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. <p>'A very unique cat - a French Canadian Hinayana Buddhist Beat Catholic savant' Allen Ginsberg</p>