Visions of Cody.

Visions of Cody is Jack Kerouac’s most ambitious and experimental work, an expansive portrait of Cody Pomeray, his fictional counterpart for Neal Cassady, the restless muse who had appeared as Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Written in 1951 and 1952 in the flush of Kerouac’s discovery of spontaneous prose, it abandons conventional narrative for a torrent of sketches, transcribed tape recordings, imitations, and reveries, and Kerouac regarded it as the deeper and truer telling of the material he had treated in his most famous novel. Considered too radical to publish in his lifetime, it circulated for years only as a limited edition of excerpts and appeared complete only after his death, prefaced by Allen Ginsberg’s introduction The Great Rememberer. Ginsberg (1926-1997), the author of Howl and Kerouac’s closest friend since their Columbia University days, was a founding figure of the Beat Generation, and his introduction remains one of the most eloquent appreciations of Kerouac’s art.