the book that made him an overnight celebrity, Kerouac examines with wrenching clarity his unwished for fame, escalating alcoholism, and troubling alienation from nature. In a thinly veiled autobiographical account of his time in Big Sur at the cabin of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and with friends in San Francisco--among them fellow iconoclasts Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder, and Alan Watts--he chronicles a ruinous alcoholic bender with searing psychological candor. Kerouac displays full mastery of pace, structure, and idiom in Big Sur--a tale that ends with a crescendo as finely wrought and poignant as any in American literature. Includes a character key and a detailed biographical timeline.