Though I find them wildly entertaining, it’s not the stories of drinking port, smoking tea, chasing girls, hopping trains, or abruptly setting out for distant parts of Mexico that draw me to the writing of Jack Kerouac. It’s the search for meaning.
And that’s why I loved Kerouac’s first novel, The Sea Is My Brother, written in 1943, when he was 21, but just published for the first time in North America by Da Capo Press.
The book isn’t what I would describe as good—but it still left me with that feeling that life is full of poems, pain, colorful characters, and small moments that matter.