Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha »

Jack Kerouac was born in Massachusetts in 1922 and attended Columbia University in New York City, where he became identified with the nascent Beat movement. Viking's publication of On the Road in 1957 established Kerouac as one of the foremost literary voices of his time. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969.

In the mid-1950s, Jack Kerouac, a lifelong Catholic, became fascinated with Buddhism, an interest that had a profound impact on his ideas of spirituality and later found expression in books such as Mexico City Blues and The Dharma Bums. Originally written in 1955 and now published for the first time in book form, Wake Up is Kerouac s retelling of the life of Prince Siddartha Gotama, who as a young man abandoned his wealthy family and comfortable home for a lifelong search for Enlightenment. Distilled from a wide variety of canonical scriptures, Wake Up serves as both a penetrating account of the Buddha s life and a concise primer on the principal teachings of Buddhism.

James R. Kuhlman - Library Journal

There is surely no want for works treating the life of the Buddha; biographies and fictionalized accounts abound, including many better than this as literature (e.g., Herman Hesse's Siddhartha), as history (e.g., Karen Armstrong's Buddha), or as theology. Nevertheless, fans of the Beats and students of Kerouac in particular will welcome, long after his death in 1969, this apparent first publication, in book form, of his interpretation of "Gotama Buddha's life as represented in Asvhaghosha's 'Buddha-Charita' and in Narasu's 'Life of the Historic Buddha' with adornments and re-arrangements." Kerouac and his fellow Beats identified closely with those inhabiting society's margins. Buddhism's inherent sympathies doubtless influenced Kerouac in his explorations of the lives of the downtrodden in his On the Road and The Subterraneans, evidenced by a substantial literature including Ellis Amburn's Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. Though not a particularly pleasant or straightforward read, as the Buddha occasionally sounds a bit like Yoda, this book is highly recommended to join Kerouac's oeuvre, including his other book on Buddhism, Some of the Dharma, in academic libraries and the literature collections of larger public libraries.