And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks - Penguin Modern Classics
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks - Penguin Modern Classics
paperback
Published:
6 August, 2009
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Description
In alternating chapters that reveal a nascent period in their development as two of the twentieth century's most influential writers, Beat Generation icons William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac's And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is an electrifying true-life mystery, including afterword by James Grauerholtz in Penguin Modern Classics.
This is a hardboiled crime novel, and a true story. In 1944, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, then still unknown writers, were both arrested following a murder: one of their friends had stabbed another and then come to them for advice - neither had told the police. Later they wrote this fictionalised account of that summer - of a group of friends in wartime New York, moving through each other's apartments, drinking, necking, talking and taking drugs and haphazardly drifting towards a bloody crime. Unpublished for years, And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks is a remarkable insight into the lives and literary development of two great writers.
If you enjoyed And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks, you might like Kerouac's On the Road, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.
'The novel that kicked it all off'
Independent
'An insight into Kerouac before he went on the road and Burroughs before his drug use spiralled out of control, this is a major literary event'
GQ
More Details
| Type | Book |
|---|---|
| ISBN13 | 9780141189673 |
| ISBN10 | 0141189673 |
| Number Of Pages | 224 |
| Item Weight | 168 g |
| Product Dimensions | 130 x 198 x 15 mm |
| Publisher / Reseller | Penguin Books Ltd |
| Format | paperback |
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Author's Bio
Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. Educated by Jesuit brothers in Lowell, he decided to become a writer at age seventeen and developed his own writing style, which he called 'spontaneous prose'. He used this technique to record the life of the American 'traveler' and the experiences of the Beat Generation, most memorably in On the Road and also in The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums. His other works include Big Sur, Desolation Angels, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Gerard, Tristessa, and a book of poetry called Mexico City Blues. Jack Kerouac died in 1969.