Five years after On the Road, the book that made him an overnight celebrity, Kerouac examines with wrenching clarity his unwished for fame, escalating alcoholism, and troubling alienation from nature. In a thinly veiled autobiographical account of his time in Big Sur at the cabin of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and with friends in San Francisco—among them fellow iconoclasts Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder, and Alan Watts—he chronicles a ruinous alcoholic bender with searing psychological candor. Kerouac displays full mastery of pace, structure, and idiom in Big Sur—a tale that ends with a crescendo as finely wrought and poignant as any in American literature. Includes a character key and a detailed biographical timeline.