From the bard of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac's Maggie Cassidy is an autobiographical novel of young love, published in Penguin Modern Classics. Though publishers stopped Maggie Cassidy's Jack Duluoz and On the Road's Sal Paradise from sharing the same name, Kerouac meant the books to be two parts of the same life. While On the Road made Paradise (and Kerouac) a hero for generations to come of the disaffected and restless, Maggie Cassidy is an affectionate portrait of the teenager that made the man - of friendship and ...
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From the bard of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac's Maggie Cassidy is an autobiographical novel of young love, published in Penguin Modern Classics. Though publishers stopped Maggie Cassidy's Jack Duluoz and On the Road's Sal Paradise from sharing the same name, Kerouac meant the books to be two parts of the same life. While On the Road made Paradise (and Kerouac) a hero for generations to come of the disaffected and restless, Maggie Cassidy 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'. Jack Kerouac (1922-69) was an American novelist, poet, artist and part of the Beat Generation. His first published novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957, that made Kerouac famous. Publication of his many other books followed, among them The Subterraneans, Big Sur, and The Dharma Bums. Kerouac died in Florida at the age of forty-seven. If you enjoyed Maggie Cassidy, you might like Kerouac's The Subterraneans and Pic, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'A very unique cat - a French Canadian Hinayana Buddhist Beat Catholic savant' Allen Ginsberg
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Kerouac's autobiographical novel "Maggie Cassidy" is set in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts in 1939. It is the story of a high school romance in all its innocence and sexual frustration. The book includes wonderful descriptive passages of winter in New England, of shabby urban tenements, of grizzled and failed adults, and of hope, love, and loss.
The book captures the yearnings of first love in its confusion and undirected passion. It talks about both how people change and how there are limits to the scope of their change. The perspective of the book is interesting and revealing. Kerouac, the grown writer, is recapturing something of the spirit of the first love of his youth. The story is mostly told in the first person in the voice of the adolescent. Then, abruptly at the end the voice shifts to the third person signalling, I think, the change from the perspective of youth to that of adulthood.
There is something poignant about the book in the description of a memory of pure love which doesn't fade, (think of the Buddy Holly song "Not fade away") and about the shift from innocence to overt sexuality. There is a deep conservatism in Kerouac for the familiar, the commonplace, and the local, something which is often overlooked by his critics and admirers alike. It comes through well in this book.
Many writers tend to become prisoners of their most famous books. In Kerouac's case, people frequently don't get past "On the Road". "Maggie Cassidy" is a book on a smaller, more conventional scale. In its own way, it is precious.
