The Dharma Bums

Ray Smith is a Buddhist poet trying to practise non-attachment in a world that keeps offering him things to be attached to. Japhy Ryder — based on the poet Gary Snyder — is the most complete person Ray has ever met: scholar, mountain climber, Zen practitioner, and the living proof that it is possible to be fully awake while the rest of the world sleeps. Together they head for the mountains.

Less celebrated than On the Road but loved more deeply by those who find it, The Dharma Bums is Kerouac’s most spiritually sincere novel — a book about the possibility of a different way of living, one that replaces the frantic horizontal motion of On the Road with something vertical: the ascent of mountains, the discipline of meditation, the search for clarity in silence.

The mountain-climbing scenes are among the finest in American fiction — physical, precise, and genuinely thrilling. And Japhy Ryder remains one of American literature’s most persuasive portraits of how a person can be fully, completely alive. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.