The Dharma Bums: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Jack Kerouac (EPUB)

Description

Jack Kerouac’s classic novel about friendship, the search for meaning, and the allure of natureFirst published in 1958, a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouac’s most powerful and influential novels. The story focuses on two ebullient young Americans–mountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder, and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writer–whose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Francisco’s Bohemia to solitude and mountain climbing in the High Sierras.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading The Dharma Bums. I didn’t remember much about Jack Kerouac’s writing having read On The Road, many back in the day years ago; the experience was stuck in my mind’s dusty archives. I wasn’t the same person who read On The Road back then, I was here now in the present suspecting I might be a Dharma Bum of sorts myself.The Dharma Bums is a cultural walk-about America in the late 1950’s with the spread of suburbia, a growing middle class with an increasing addiction to television and sameness. It also includes vivid and beautiful representations of natural phenomenon from the desert to the high mountains. The characters that Ray Smith, the narrator of the story, meets in his travels range from intellectuals, artists, poets and beatnik friends, to hobos he meets as he hops fast freight trains up the California Coast or thumbs rides with truck drivers and others while he travels across the country a couple of times. He carries his home on his back and to some extent depends on the good will of those he meets on his path. He meditates in the desert, mountain meadows and the woods. He exchanges what he has learned with his fellow Dharma Bums and gains insight from them and his travels. At times Ray Smith and his Dharma buddies seem like modern-day bhikkhu (monks), each on the path of enlightenment in their own way.This is a trip that anyone can enjoy, from the first time Ray Smith, the main character, hops a freight train, headed North up the California coast. Even though it was written some time ago it feels contemporary and relevant today. One thing I knew as I began reading The Dharma Bums, was that Jack Kerouac knows how to tell a story. I also became happily aware that this book was an adventure entwined with the basis of Mindfulness including the “Four Noble Truths” and the “Eight-fold Path;” a Bodhisattva’s journey looking for nothing, knowing and not knowing. The two main characters Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder are on a quest for truth that finds them climbing mountains in the high sierras, partying with San Fransisco Bohemians, and others and writing their own poetry.“…Pray tell us, good buddy, and don’t make it muddy, who played this trick, on Harry and Dick, and why is so mean this Eternal Scene, just what’s the point, of this whole joint? I thought maybe I could find out at last from these Dharma Bums.” — Jack Kerouac — The Dharma BumsI’d be willing to bet that a lot of people these days may not know much about Jack Kerouac. I wonder if his work is read in high school or college English classes? It should be. Probably banned in Texas or Alabama, like Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye. Kerouac was born in Lowell Massachusetts in 1922, went to public school and ended up with a scholarship to Columbia in New York City where he met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs who turn up in The Dharma Bums. Kerouac died in St. Pete Florida in 1969 at the age of forty-seven.Those who do remember Jack Kerouac would probably think of the classic “On The Road” that was published in 1957 and made Kerouac one of the most appreciated writers of that time. “On The Road” came to personify what was called the “Beat Generation.” Other books followed including those in what Kerouac included in the “The Duluoz Legend Series” including The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, Big Sur, other novels and poetry. But Kerouac’s writing is a lot more than “Beat Generation” tales.The Dharma Bums was published in 1958, after On the Road. Written in College Park, a neighborhood in Orlando, Florida. It is a subtle, non-preachy primer, in some ways, on certain concepts found in Buddhism, in particular Zen Buddhism. But written as a novel, in Kerouac’s rhythmic, descriptive and first person conversational storytelling style, these notions come up naturally. Words, sentences and paragraphs loose their individual functions as they create a new actuality, moving, nudging and seducing the reader into the strokes and colors of the author’s word paintings. “But I had my own little bangtail ideas and they had nothing to do with the ‘lunatic’ part of this. I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect solitude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas. I intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world. To be in some riverbottom somewhere, or in a desert, or in mountains, or in some hut in Mexico or shack in Adirondack, and rest and be kind, and do nothing else, practice what the Chinese call ‘do-nothing.” I didn’t want to have anything to do, really, either with Japhy’s ideas about society (I figured it would be better just to avoid it altogether, walk around it) or with any of Alvah’s ideas about grasping after life as much as you can because of its sweet sadness and because you would be dead some day.” — Jack Kerouac The Dharma BumsRay Smith’s journey moves along spontaneously and as fast paced as Jack Kerouac’s prose. This timeless story is hard to put down with a bonus if you are interested in Dharma, mindfulness and Buddhist philosophy; you will find many moments in the book with which to relate. Beyond the philosophy you will find a artfully crafted novel that is engaging and classic, as a spiritual journey to find self or perhaps no self. Jack Kerouac, intentionally or not created his own Buddha book of “sutras” and left them with us. JRMartin

⭐I made the mistake of reading this book while waiting in line for the doors to open during a Black Friday sale. It was on the third day of my overnight camping spree in the front of our only towns Best Buy store. I was just waking up from a power nap and I decided to find something to read on my kindle tablet. Looking back on it, it was a funny coincidence because I remember feeling like a bum–camping on the ground for the third day in a row–and I searched the word “bum” on my kindle. This book popped up and I liked the illustrations on the cover so I bought it and began to read. By about the 22nd page I was rethinking my entire life and wondering why I stopped living so freely as I used to in my earlier years of life. In my twenties I was a reckless idealist who chased after the fairy tale love and smoked copious amounts of mind altering substances. Tens of pounds on the weekends and nearly a pound a day during the week….my father was a business man so there was never an empty jar in the house or lack of Bic lighters near the nightstand. Anyway I’ve settled into the cushy resolve as a software engineer and have lost sight of many dreams I used to have as a lost young man. This book stirred something in me as I continued to read it. I found myself not blessing anyone who sneezed anymore, I rediscovered the joy of crapping into my sweatpants and letting the soil run slowly to the finish line of my shoe tops and I went home. Black Friday sales suck and this book is super tits. Buy it and live again!

⭐DHARMA BUMS came out a year after ON THE ROAD. While the latter is the beat manifesto celebrating the peripatetic lifestyle, BUMS focuses on the beat romance with Buddhist enlightenment and the building of an inner life. ON THE ROAD was an instant, memorable success, and while BUMS no doubt fed a desire for more of the same, it stands apart, its own satisfying work of art, its own way of sending telegraphs from the heart of the beat movement. Many of the episodes are based on actual events and experiences that were still fresh memories as the book was written.Ray Smith is the first person narrator of DHARMA BUMS, a look alike for Jack Kerouac. For most of the book, he slyly puts Japhy Ryder at the center of attention. Ryder is a stand-in for poet Gary Snyder who survives, who as a young man in his twenties was already a natural leader. Surrounding them are other familiar figures from the era, including Alvah Goldbook (translates to Allen Ginsberg). They all write poetry and love jazz, women, and a casual lifestyle. They seek spiritual enlightenment. They delight in trolling for clothes in the Good Will and Army and Navy stores, they savor the simplest meal over a campfire. They are the Dharma Bums, rejecting the paralyzed emptiness they ascribe to middle class life.I really like this book. The prose is clear and concrete, even when sorting through abstract notions. It is often funny. Kerouac had extraordinary insight into individual nuances and desires, and plays them into the tension of the journey and the sorting out. He had a gift for seeing how outsiders might perceive him and his crowd and how history might come to interpret the present he was portraying. Though he is legendarily perceived as a spontaneous artist, there is extraordinary control and shape imposed on these pages. Only twice does he momentarily break his world: once, in my edition, he slips and refers to Japhy as Gary, and another time, slipping out of the immediacy of the action, he pays a compliment to a simple meal on the road, noting that even as a lionized young writer in New York, he had not had a better meal in an upscale restaurant. Those curious nanoseconds can be forgiven, however. This book is a joy.

⭐”Are we fallen angels who didn’t want to believe that nothing is nothing and so we were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?””The Dharma Bums” is a naked disquisition on all those cool existential questions. Quite Buddhist, of course, in its flavour, and not without moments of profundity. It seems to divide opinion though. Perhaps it’s a bit naive, self-indulgent – pretentious in places. A sort of youthful exuberance pervades; something of the excitable teenager at times. (Though Ray is in his early thirties.) And sticklers will quibble, of course, over the veracity and accuracy of the Buddhist theory and experience…Still, there’s a genuine, urgent, poetic imperative going on – a real lust for life and self-exploration that comes from the heart. It’s hard to fault the source of this outpouring, however occasionally misjudged the results. Quite often though, whilst forming these snooty opinions, a line will trip you over with its acuity.”Standing on my head before bedtime on that rock roof of the moonlight I could indeed see that the earth was truly upside-down and a man a weird vain beetle full of strange ideas walking around upside-down and boasting.”

⭐On the road is the best book I’ve read since the time traveller’s wife (very very different books) so I had very high expectations for the dharma bums – I absolutely adore Jack Kerouacs fast flowing, hyperactive style of writing but the dharma bums really seemed to lack something for me, and despite being a very short book I often found myself struggling to read certain parts and forgetting what I had read shortly afterwards, I am still hugely excited to read more from Kerouac though. Maybe the story was in need of bigger more important characters as they failed to come to life for me in this book and I failed to connect with the characters introduced, or maybe a splash of drama somewhere in there as the story had no peaks or troughs and instead rolled flatly along but maybe this is the point and I missed it

⭐The book I’m reviewing here is the Penguin Modern Classics Kindle version, ASIN B005D6BCJY. In the intro, Ann Douglas explains who the real people and events Kerouac describes were (I’d known it was autobiographical but didn’t know how precise his cyphers were for real individuals, including the night of the San Francisco Renaissance in poetry.) The Kindle text is well formatted and easy on the eye.That said, one small flaw is that the (hyperlinked) table of contents is a plain 1, 2,3, 4 list of chapters. Adding the first line of each chapter would have helped navigate what is, by definition, a rambling and stream-of-consciousness novel.You can’t go wrong with great writers and the benefit of hindsight, so we buy these editions (if we’re honest) for how good they look on our bookshelf (real or virtual.) And with cover designs, Penguin’s still getting it right after 50 years. A good edition of a classic.

⭐Big Kerouac fan, although The Dharma Bums isn’t one of my favourites of his; the Penguin Modern Classics are beautiful editions though!

⭐Following on from On The Road, the phase when Kerouac, as Ray Smith, meets with and learns from Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder). The search for wisdom and enlightenment through Buddhism. The people he meets, the places, the experiences. A beautiful, poetic journey.

Keywords

Free Download The Dharma Bums: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) in EPUB format
The Dharma Bums: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) EPUB Free Download
Download The Dharma Bums: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) 1971 EPUB Free
The Dharma Bums: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) 1971 EPUB Free Download
Download The Dharma Bums: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) EPUB
Free Download Ebook The Dharma Bums: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)