Original title: The Sea Is My Brother

Ddate of publishing: 14.05.2010

N° od pages: 160

Binding: Tvrdá väzba / Hardback

ISBN: 978-80-89445-06-6

Jack Kerouac

When that october night in 1969 Jack Kerouac was dyeing from the stomach bleeding, no one knew, the least the author himself, that his first novel The Sea is My Brother, which he himself pushed away, will not see the light for the first time in USA, but in 2010 in Slovakia, in Artforum. 

The oeuvre of Kerouac is the life creed of the beat generation of America and also it formed it's style. The spontaneous prose of Kerouac On the Road together with the poem of Ginsberg Howling became the manifestos of a generation that defied the social conventions and conformism of the fifties. Passionate gathering of life experience, reinforced by drugs, sex and bepop were in contrast with consume, careerism and technical rationalism. It was not about leading a proper life, but about having a life that brings satisfaction. behind this hectic and nonconformist hedonism, an old romantic dream about deleting the alienation of man and nature was hidden.

The Sea is My Brother is a rebellion of an individual against the limitations of human society and it's cruel conventions and pains. Wesley Martin, the hero, loves the sea with an ununderstandable brother love. the sea is his brother and also his executioner. The book is although also a story of his friend Bill Everhart. He runs away from the society to the sea, that for him becomes a source of never-ending loneliness. 

Artforum decided to bring the slovak version of on of the first manuscripts of Jack Kerouac because if slovak readers really want to understand Kerouac as writer, they should start reading his work in chronological order starting with The Sea is My Brother.