The Subterraneans Author:Jack Kerouac The Subterraneans is a sharp, extraordinarily written novel of love and despair among the young poets, painters, and jazz musicians of postwar San Francisco. In the center of this frenetic and stormy milieu are the writer Leo Percepied and the young Black girl, Mardou Fox. Kerouac describes this tender but doomed affair in a prose that has been ... more »compared by some to that of Thomas Wolfe and by others to the rich music of Dylan Thomas. It is a wild, nervous prose ideally suited to the world in which Leo and Mardou revolve - the noisy bars and jazz clubs, the alleyways and cheap pads of San Francisco in the 'fifties.« less