On the Road 50th Anniversary Ed. | What Happened Later | Ecstasy of the Beats
Pages Books & Magazines, Thomas Allen & Sons, and Dundurn Press proudly present a special This Is Not A Reading Series double book launch to honour the 50th anniversary of the publication of "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac. Ray Robertson What Happened Later & David Creighton Ecstasy of The Beats in conversation with Jian Ghomeshi of CBC Radio's 'Q'.
What Happened Later: Taking its title from Kerouac himself—"What Happened Later" was the title of his proposed sequel to On The Road—this novel tells the story of what happened after the fame generated by Kerouac's famous book and what happened next in the life of a young man infatuated with the legendary author. Interweaving the story of one author's slow decline with one boy's literary coming of age, "What Happened Later" explores the ever-shifting dualities of myth and reality, loss and hope, innocence and experience, endings and beginnings.
Ecstasy of the Beats: Who were the beats? Not the sandle-clad "beatniks" of popular lore but dedicated writers, experimenters, skit improvisers, theorizers, hedonists, close friends, bisexual free lovers, shapers of the future. The beats hung out at Columbia university and cheap Times Square cafeterias, devouring ideas. David Creighton shows how the world has taken up their message. In Ecstasy of the Beats he gives a fresh portrait of Carolyn Cassady, "Queen of the Beats," and of the four major Beat writers.
Jack Kerouac's On the Road gave a pattern of adventure to restless youth, Allen Ginsberg donned a prophet's robe by writing Howl, William Burroughs warned against control mechanisms in Naked Lunch, and Neal Cassady's high-energy life made him an icon of freedom. Travelling widely to see where they lived, Creighton enriches the meaning of On the Road and other Beat classics. He invites the reader on the Beats' journey toward ever-deeper levels of understanding and provides interesting insight into Kerouac's French-Canadian roots.
David Creighton wrote two books and Losing the Empress(Dundurn), about the sinking of the Empress of Ireland, which led to a role in Robert Ballard's PBS documentary Lost Liners. He likes to travel luggage-free, staying in offbeat places like Amsterdam's Hotel Brian, but otherwise lives with his wife, Judy, in Burlington, Ontario.
