- Jack Kerouac
“‘One fast move or I’m gone,’ I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness,” Jack Kerouac wrote in his 1962 novel Big Sur. “That feeling when you wake up with the delirium tremens with the fear of early death dripping from your ears like those special heavy cobwebs spiders weave in the hot countries, the feeling of being a bentback mudmad monster groaning underground in hot steaming mud pulling a long hot burden nowhere…”
Kerouac chronicled his retreat from fame and addiction in Big Sur, seven years after On the Road made him a reluctant generational icon. Filmmaker Curt Worden traces Kerouac’s journey in One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur, screening one night only, Tuesday 10/20 at Webster Place.