Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the artist's birth, this book is the intended to be a faithful posthumous execution of the project. Containing a wealth of unpublished materials, and representing a decade of work and research, it promises to be the definitive book on the artist's life and work. Beginning with his very first collages and early subway tags - including many heretofore unseen photographs of the first ephemeral chalk drawings - through the development of the iconic graphic work now synonymous with his name, the book follows his meteoric rise to international stardom and worldwide recognition. Completely unprecedented in its scope, this volume documents everything from sketches to unedited interviews; personal snapshots to party invitations, bringing to life an extraordinary decade in art and history.

In 1952 and 1953 as he wandered around America, Jack Kerouac jotted down spontaneous prose poems, or "sketches" as he called them, on small notebooks that he kept in his shirt pockets. The poems recount his travels--New York, North Carolina, Lowell (Massachusetts, Kerouac's birthplace), San Francisco, Denver, Kansas, Mexico--observations, and meditations on art and life. The poems are often strung together so that over the course of several of them, a little story--or travelogue--appears, complete in itself. Published for the first time, Book of Sketches offers a luminous, intimate, and transcendental glimpse of one of the most original voices of the twentieth century at a key time in his literary and spiritual development.