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This novel appeared just a year after the author's explosive On the Road put the Beat Generation on the literary map and Kerouac on the best-seller lists. The same expansiveness, humor, and contagious zest for life that sparked the earlier novel sparks this one but through a more cohesive story. The principals are two ebullient young men engaged in a passionate search for dharma, or Truth. Their major adventure is the pursuit of the Zen way, which takes them climbing into the high Sierras to seek the lesson of solitude- a lesson that has a hard time surviving their forays into the pagan groves of San Francisco's Bohemia with its marathon wine-drinking bouts, poetry jam esssions, experiments in "yabyum" and similar nonacetic pastimes. New York Post called it "Vivid evocation of a part of our time." Edge wear, underlining and highlighting.

The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The semi-autobiographical story is based on the author's experiences during the mid-1950s while living in California, after he'd become interested in Buddhism's spiritual mode of understanding. One of the main characters, Japhy Ryder, is based on the real poet Gary Snyder, who was a close friend and whose interest in Buddhism influenced Kerouac.