Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Town and the City | 1950 |
| On the Road | 1957 |
| The Subterraneans | 1958 |
| The Dharma Bums | 1958 |
| Doctor Sax | 1959 |
| Maggie Cassidy | 1959 |
| Tristessa | 1960 |
| Book of Dreams | 1960 |
| Big Sur | 1962 |
| Visions of Gerard | 1963 |
| Desolation Angels | 1965 |
| Satori in Paris | 1966 |
| Vanity of Duluoz | 1968 |
| Pic | 1971 |
| Visions of Cody | 1972 |
| Orpheus Emerged | 2000 |
| On the Road: The Original Scroll | 2007 |
| And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (With: William S. Burroughs) | 2008 |
| The Sea Is My Brother | 2011 |
| The Haunted Life and Other Writings | 2014 |
Publication Order of Poetry Collections
| Mexico City Blues | 1959 |
| The Scripture of the Golden Eternity | 1960 |
| Scattered Poems | 1971 |
| Old Angel Midnight | 1973 |
| Trip Trap: Haiku on the Road from SF to NY (With: Albert Saijo, Lew Welch) | 1973 |
| Heaven and Other Poems | 1977 |
| San Francisco Blues | 1983 |
| Pomes All Sizes | 1992 |
| Book of Blues | 1995 |
| Book of Haikus | 2003 |
| Book of Sketches | 2006 |
Publication Order of Collections
| Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings | 1999 |
| The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings | 2016 |
| La Vie Est d’Hommage | 2016 |
| Desolation Peak: Collected Writings | 2022 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Lonesome Traveler | 1960 |
| Dear Carolyn: Letters to Carolyn Cassady | 1983 |
| Good Blonde & Others | 1993 |
| Selected Letters, 1940-1956 | 1995 |
| Some of the Dharma | 1997 |
| Selected Letters, 1957-1969 | 1999 |
| Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947-1954 | 2004 |
| Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha | 2008 |
| Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters (With: Allen Ginsberg) | 2010 |
About Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac (born 12 March 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts; died 21 October 1969 in St. Petersburg, Florida) was an American novelist and poet and, with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. He is best known for “On the Road” (1957) and for the stream-of-consciousness method he called spontaneous prose.
He was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac to French-Canadian parents, spoke French at home and began learning English at school at about six. His older brother Gerard died in 1926 aged nine, a loss he returned to in “Visions of Gerard”. A football scholarship took him to Columbia University in 1940, but he dropped out after his playing career ended. He served as a merchant mariner in 1942 and wrote a first novel, “The Sea Is My Brother”, which stayed unpublished until 2011. In New York he met Ginsberg, Burroughs and Neal Cassady, who became characters in his books.
“The Town and the City” appeared in 1950 under the name John Kerouac and sold poorly. In April 1951 he typed a full draft of “On the Road” in about three weeks on a 120-foot roll of taped-together tracing paper. The book is based on his road trips across the United States and Mexico with Cassady. Several publishers rejected it before Viking Press brought it out in 1957, and a New York Times review by Gilbert Millstein declared him the voice of a new generation.
The success let him publish manuscripts written in the years between. “The Subterraneans” and “The Dharma Bums” came out in 1958, the latter drawing on his Buddhist studies and his travels with the poet Gary Snyder. “Doctor Sax”, “Maggie Cassidy”, “Tristessa”, “Big Sur” and “Desolation Angels” followed, along with poetry such as “Mexico City Blues” (1959), a sequence of 242 choruses. Kerouac called his autobiographical books, taken together, the Duluoz Legend. “Vanity of Duluoz” (1968) was the last work published in his lifetime.
Kerouac died in hospital in 1969 after an oesophageal haemorrhage, and his funeral was held in Lowell. Previously unseen work has continued to appear, including the full text of “Visions of Cody” (1972), “On the Road: The Original Scroll” (2007) and “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks” (2008), written with Burroughs in 1945. Film versions of “On the Road” and “Big Sur” were released in 2012 and 2013.
Photo: Arni (jacket photograph, first edition of The Town and the City, 1950), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).