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The Sea Is My Brother

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The Sea Is My Brother

Written by: Jack Kerouac
Narrated by: Ray Porter
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About this listen

In the spring of 1943, during a stint in the merchant marines, 21-year-old Jack Kerouac set out to write his first novel. Working diligently day and night to complete it by hand, he titled it The Sea Is My Brother. Nearly 70 years later, its long-awaited publication provides fascinating details and insight into the early life and development of an American literary icon.

Written seven years before The Town and the City officially launched his writing career, The Sea Is My Brother marks the pivotal point at which Kerouac began laying the foundations for his pioneering method and signature style. The novel chronicles the misadventures of two seamen who at first seem different but are really two sides of the same coin: 27-year-old Wesley Martin, who “loved the sea with a strange, lonely love”, and William Everhart, an assistant professor of English at Columbia College who, at 32, impulsively ships out, hoping to “escape society for the sea, but finds the sea a place of terrible loneliness.”

A clear precursor to such landmark novels as On the Road, The Dharma Bums, and Visions of Cody, it is an important formative work that bears all the hallmarks of classic Kerouac: the search for spiritual meaning in a materialistic world, spontaneous travel as the true road to freedom, late nights of intense conversation in bars and apartments, the desperate urge to escape from society, and the strange, terrible beauty of loneliness.

©2011 John Sampras, the Estate of Stella Kerouac; Introduction 2011 by Dawn Ward (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Art & Literature Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction World Literature Adventure United States Fiction Military
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What the critics say

“Published for the first time, the novel betrays the faults of inexperience….But these are outweighed by its virtues - the vitality of its dialogue, the freshness and power of its descriptions, whether of cheap saloons, cramped cabins, or sunrise at sea. A social concern rarely found in American fiction since Dos Passos.” ( Daily Mail, London)
“The real value in The Sea Is My Brother is that it shows that Kerouac didn’t spring fully formed as the ‘King of the Beats,’ but had an evolution, a period of growing up and maturing, and that he - as any great writer must - certainly paid his dues.” ( Independent, London)

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Ray Porter Reigns Supreme!

…first begun in 1943 during a stint with the Merchant Marines, this novel was never truly completed, and was published as “The Lost Kerouac Novel” after several notated drafts were put together via the Kerouac Estate. This is classic Kerouac: drunken nights in bars, riding the road, trying to escape the stress of society…and all the while the characters wax philosophical while struggling to keep even a few dimes to their name.

I was introduced to Kerouac via “On The Road” (1957), which I listened to while working in an Inuvik bakery during the pandemic…and I hated how pretentious, misogynistic and outright “rapey” that classic was; this one is dramaticly less those things; and while it gets stuck on a lengthy debate about the joys of communism, it was definitely an interesting listen…thanks largely to the amazing voice of Ray Porter.

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