Product Description

The Dharma Bums was published one year after On the Road made Jack Kerouac a celebrity and a spokesperson for the Beat Generation. Sparked by his contagious zest for life, the novel relates the adventures of an ebullient group of Beatnik seekers in a freewheeling exploration of Buddhism and the search for Truth.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7878 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

About the Author
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) is one of the primary voices of the Beat Generation. His books include On the Road, The Subterraneans, Big Sur, and Visions of Cody.

Ann Douglas teaches at Columbia University and is the author of Terrible Honesty.

Seth’s illustrations have appeared in such publications as the Washington Post, Details, Spin, and the New York Times. He is best known for his continuing comic-book series Palooka-Ville.

Customer Reviews

In search of the eternal state of being
As Kerouac notes in the introductory chapter, he met Gary Snyder, a.k.a. Japhy Ryder in 1955, just before Snyder went off to Japan to immerse himself in Zen Buddhism. What follows is a free-wheeling account of their time together in perhaps Kerouac's most appealling and certainly most postive book. Dharma Bums is a celebration of American Buddhism, which was budding in San Francisco at the time, with a number of Beat poets reading their haikus and free-verse poems at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. Once again, Kerouac revels in changing names, but among the many prominent faces presented in this autobiographical novel are Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Snyder was the rising star, a Buddhist scholar and translator of books of Japanese and Chinese poetry while studying at Berkley. Snyder, like Kerouac, had working class roots and the two hit it off from the start, exulting in each other's state of being.

Kerouac devotes Dharma Bums to Snyder in the same way he did On the Road to Neal Cassady. It was one of Kerouac's more happy times, as he was heavy into Buddhism, and sought out Snyder as a soulmate and mentor. Kerouac sets the stage wonderfully, coming across a hobo reading from St. Theresa on a train bound for LA, coming back from Mexico. He then hops the "Zipper" up to San Francisco, which whirled along at 80 miles an hour on the California coastline. Kerouac hangs out at Ginsberg's cabin in the Berkley hills, but it is Snyder's spartan cabin that draws his attention. Snyder had already chosen to live the life of an aesthete, giving up most of his worldly possessions, except for his famous rucksack and orange crates of books, mostly of poetry. Kerouac captures some wonderful moments as they all gathered around drinking wine and engaging in yab yum with a girl who went by the name of Princess.

The heart of the story revolves around Jack's and Gary's hike to the Matterhorn in the Sierra Nevada, in which the two form a strong bond that propells Kerouac on other adventures, including a summer at Desolation Peak in the northern Cascades that would become the subject of his next book, Desolation Angels. Kerouac's writing shines in this book, as he is able to maintain such an ecstatic high throughout the narrative, almost seeming to touch the sky. Of course, having such a positive person like Gary Snyder to wrap the book around gave Kerouac the impelling force he needed, as on his own Kerouac often sank into melancholy and despair, which characterized his later years. One marvels at the free and easy nature of this pair as they search out their respective enlightenment, drawing on nature and their sense of the eternal cosmos.

One doesn't have to be well versed in Buddhism to appreciate this book, although allusions and references are many and may confuse some readers. Just let yourself go and enjoy the free flow of the narrative, which is Kerouac at his best.

The Dharma Bums
Following the success of "On the Road", Kerouac's publishers initially rejected his manuscripts such as "The Subterraneans" and "Tristessa." But his publisher asked him to write an accessible, popular novel continuing with the themes of "On the Road." Kerouac responded with "The Dharma Bums" which was published late in 1958. "The Dharma Bums" is more conventionally written that most of Kerouac's other books, with short, generally clear sentences and a story line that is optimistic on the whole. The book was critiqued by Allen Ginsberg and others close to Kerouac as a "travelogue" and as over-sentimentalized. But with the exception of "On the Road", "The Dharma Bums" remains Kerouac's most widely read work. I had the opportunity to reread "The Dharma Bums" and came away from the book deeply moved.

As are all of Kerouac's novels, "The Dharma Bums" is autobiographical. It is based upon Kerouac's life between 1956--1957 -- before "On the Road" appeared and made Kerouac famous. The book focuses upon the relationship between Kerouac, who in the book is called Ray Smith and his friend, the poet Gary Snyder, called Japhy Ryder, ten years Kerouac's junior. Kerouac died in 1969, while Snyder is still alive and a highly regarded poet. Allen Ginsberg (Alvah Goldbrook) and Neal Cassady (Cody Pomeray), among others, also are characters in the book. Most of the book is set in San Francisco and its environs, but there are scenes of Kerouac's restless and extensive travelling by hitchiking, walking, jumping freight trains, and taking buses, as he visits Mexico, and his mother's home in Rocky Mount, North Carolina during the course of the book.

The strenght of "The Dharma Bums" lies in its scenes of spiritual seriousness and meditation. During the period described in the book, Kerouac had become greatly interested in Buddhism. He describes himself as a "bhikku" -- a Buddhist monk -- and had been celibate for a year when the book begins. I have been studying Buddhism myself for many years, and it is easy to underestimate Kerouac's understanding of Buddhism. As with many authors, he was wiser in his writing that he was in his life. There is a sense of the sadness and changeable character of existence and of the value of compassion for all beings that comes through eloquently in "The Dharma Bums." Smith and Ryder have many discussions about Buddhism -- at various levels of seriousness -- during the course of the novel. Ryder tends to use Buddhism to be critical of and alienated from American society and its excessive materialism and devotion to frivolity such as television. Smith has the broader vision and sees compassion and understanding as a necessary part of the lives of everyone. Smith tends to be more meditative and quiet in his Buddhist practice -- he spends a great deal of time in the book sitting and "doing nothing" while Ryder is generally active and on the go, hiking, chopping wood, studying, or womanizing. At the end of the book, he leaves for an extended trip to Japan. (He and Kerouac would never see each other again.)

"The Dharma Bums" offers a picture of a portion of American Buddhism during the 1950s. It also offers a portrayal of what has been called the "rucksack revolution" as Smith and Ryder take to the outdoors, and, in a lengthy and famous section of the book, climb the "Matterhorn" in California's Sierra Mountains. In the final chapters of the book, Kerouac spends eight isolated weeks on Desolation Peak in the Cascades as a fire watchman. He comes back yearning for human company.

Sexuality plays an important role in the book, against the backdrop of what is described as the repressed 1950's, as young girls are drawn to Ryder and he willingly shares them with an initially reluctant Smith. The book includes scenes of wild parties tinged, for Smith, with sadness, in which people of both sexes dance naked, get physically involved, and drink heavily. Near the end of the book, Ryder offers Smith a prophetic warning the alcoholism which would shortly thereafter ruin Kerouac's life.

"The Dharma Bums" is a fundamentally American book and it is full of love for the places of America, for the opportunity it offers for spiritual exploration, and for its people. Kerouac's compassion was hard earned. In his introduction to a later book, "The Lonesome Traveller" he
aptly described his books as involving the "preachment of universal kindness, which hysterial critics have failed to notice beneath frenetic activity of my true-story novels about the 'beat' generation. -- Am actually not 'beat' but strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic." I found a feeling of spirituality, of love of life in the face of vicissitudes, and of America in "The Dharma Bums." The work was indeed a popularization. But Kerouac's vision may ultimately have been broad.

Robin Friedman

Kerouac's Lyrical and Prophetic Musings
A few decades down the road from its publication, Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums seems positively prophetic. The book tells of Kerouac's adventures with his Beat-Generation bohemian cohorts in '50s America, and we can see how they and other hipsters of the time paved the way for the social and cultural revolutions of the following decades.

Originally published in 1958, the book covers events in Kerouac's life between September '55 and August '56. At the time, he had a rucksuck full of much praised yet still unpublished writings, and was soon to ride the whirlwind of fame that would be generated by the publication of On The Road. He was also trying to follow the path of Buddhism while shaking the demons of melancholy and booze, at a time when cocktails were served at business lunches and few in America had ever heard of "Zen," let alone the Dalai Lama.

There's not much to the plot: Ray Smith (standing in for Kerouac) visits his pals Japhy Ryder (poet Gary Snyder) and Alvah Goldbrook (poet Allen Ginsberg) in Berkeley, bounds up Matterhorn Peak with Ryder, explores Buddhism, attends a now-legendary San Francisco poetry reading (at the Six Gallery), and generally tries to find new kicks and follow his bliss.

As it describes Ray's wanderings, The Dharma Bums is full of optimism and melancholy, and romantic in its own unique way: Goethe meets Han Shan in the land of Eisenhower. It is one of the alcoholic writer's last stabs at breaking through his sadness, trying to step through a door into a new life. He is close to succeeding but for the wine and his unshakable brooding and impracticality. The book swings between "wild, yelling, wailing, stomping" around with lusty excited optimistic talk and "all is emptiness anyway" sighs and renunciations. Unfortunately, it is a document of a personal transformation not completed and a last happy season before the storm. In real life, Snyder took off to study in Japan and Kerouac lost his steadying influence, and fame and success would drive the already shy writer further into his bottle.

The Dharma Bums has great descriptions of places, attitudes, and people, including a marvelous portrait of the charismatic poet Snyder. The writing has a casual tone, yet is vivid and focused, and startling in its forecasting of cultural things to come. Kerouac was way ahead of his time with his evocation of Buddhism-in-action in '50s tract-home America. And he articulates the discontent of Americans unhappy with their country's prevailing zeitgeist. The character Japhy says, "You know when I was a little kid in Oregon I didn't feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values."

We feel the groundswell of the coming decade: of hippies, sexual liberation, the environmental movement, the Green Party, and college students backpacking through Europe or their own mountains. Japhy adds, "I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to the mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, young girls happy and old girls happier....Ray, by God, later on in our future life we can have a fine free-wheeling tribe in these California hills, get girls and have dozens of radiant enlightened brats, live like Indians in hogans and eat berries and buds...East'll meet West anyway."

It worked out that way for Gary Snyder (who went off to live in the Sierra Nevada foothills and has had a long career as an accomplished poet, naturalist and professor). It wasn't the path for Kerouac after all, yet his visions, wanderings and electric prose in The Dharma Bums, On The Road and other books have inspired millions of readers all over the world.