Visions of Cody: Modern Classic - Softcover

‘His most ambitious novel. An opportunity to sample the tenderness, richness and vibrancy of his writing.’ New Statesman

‘It is easy enough for us now to read the distress of America in the movies and novels of the Fifties, to see the panic and disarray behind the cosy fictions. But Kerouac read it then, when the Fifties had scarcely started. His best work is always elegiac, a mourning for something vanished before it has even properly arrived.’ New Society

‘“Visions of Cody” recreates Cody’s world in a series of epiphanies, all recorded with the expansive lyricism of a Whitman whose America has reached the end of the road. It is at once an epitaph and a rhapsodic celebration of the American Beat world.’ TLS

'Oh that Cody dream, last night he was all attentive as he never really or only rarely is – in a suit, suits always look new on him, with hair wild and bushy not because uncombable but had been ruffled in the coffee-drinking, gabbling-at-bars excitement of the broad crazy dark and dusty New York night.'

'Visions of Cody' is a celebration of the life of Neal Cassady, Kerouac's great friend and inspiration. Cassady lived his life wild and penniless amongst society's misfits and outcasts, and through him Kerouac created one of the few lasting heroes of twentieth-century literature.

''Visions of Cody' recreates Cody's world in a series of epiphanies, all recorded with the expansive lyricism of a Whitman whose America has reached the end of the road. It is at once an epitaph and a rhapsodic celebration of the American Beat world.'
TLS

'A work of primitive genius.'
ALLEN GINSBERG in the introduction to this edition.