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The Haunted Life: And Other Writings Audiobook, by Jack Kerouac Play Audiobook Sample

The Haunted Life: And Other Writings Audiobook

The Haunted Life: And Other Writings Audiobook, by Jack Kerouac Play Audiobook Sample
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Read By: Luke Daniels, Liev Schreiber Publisher: Brilliance Audio Listen Time: at 1.0x Speed 3.33 hours at 1.5x Speed 2.50 hours at 2.0x Speed Release Date: March 2014 Format: Unabridged Audiobook ISBN: 9781480583924

Quick Stats About this Audiobook

Total Audiobook Chapters:

24

Longest Chapter Length:

22:24 minutes

Shortest Chapter Length:

02:55 minutes

Average Chapter Length:

12:19 minutes

Audiobooks by this Author:

31

Other Audiobooks Written by Jack Kerouac: > View All...

Publisher Description

Jack Kerouac wrote The Haunted Life in 1944 when he was 22 years old and attending Columbia University. Originally intended as a three-part novel, only this first 20,000-word section was ever finished. Upon its completion, Kerouac promptly lost his only hand-written final draft in a New York taxi cab, remaining unknown to the public until its appearance at Christies about ten years ago.

Kerouac’s family has now decided to share this manuscript with the world.

While the entirety of the novel remained unfinished, the surviving manuscript successfully works alone as a novella with a satisfying, if open-ended, conclusion. It features a scaled-down version of the Martin family and is set in Lowell, Massachusetts, as was Kerouac’s first novel The Town and The City. Kerouac had planned on writing a cycle of novels tentatively titled An American Passed Here, which was to be set primarily in the fictional town of Galloway (based on Lowell). That cycle was to contain The Haunted Life and The Sea is My Brother, tracing the story of the Martin family throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Eventually Kerouac’s plans for his Martin cycle materialized into his first novel, The Town and the City, shortly before he moved on to compose his iconic On the Road.

Todd Tietchen, the editor of the project and the Jack Kerouac/Beat Scholar in residence at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, has assembled a number of archival documents to thicken out the context of this lost novella, documents that attest to the level of intention and care that went into Kerouac’s writing projects.

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“Undoubtedly one of the most influential and important novels of the twentieth century…A pillar of American literature.”

— Library Journal on On the Road

Quotes

  • “Kerouac is an uncanny archetype for a whole generation of Americans who trekked through the ’60s and ’70s.”

    — New York Times, praise for the author

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About Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) was an American novelist and poet who influenced generations of writers. He is recognized for his style of spontaneous prose and for being a pioneer of the Beat Generation. His first novel appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957, that epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the best-known writers of his time. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, he attended local Catholic schools and then won a scholarship to Columbia University, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, other originators of the Beat movement. 

About the Narrators

Luke Daniels, winner of sixteen AudioFile Earphones Awards and a finalist for the Audie Award for best narration, is a narrator whose many audiobook credits range from action and suspense to young-adult fiction. His background is in classical theater and film, and he has performed at repertory theaters around the country.

Liev Schreiber has been heralded as “the finest American theater actor of his generation” by the New York Times. His repertoire of resonant, humanistic and oftentimes gritty portrayals have garnered him praise in film, theater, and television. He currently stars as the title role of Ray Donovan in Showtime’s critically-acclaimed hit series.