Tristessa Author:Jack Kerouac This book, first published in 1960, is one of twelve that Jack Kerouac wrote in the six years between completing the manuscript for and the 1957 publication of On the Road, the novel that made him an overnight literary sensation. Written in two installments during visits Kerouac made to Mexico in 1955 and 1956, Trstessa is a portra... more »it of a young prostitute destroying herself in the squalid drug underworld of Mexico City. Here, in the characteristic voice of Kerouac at the height of his dazzling descriptive powers, emerge the major themes of his eclectic religious romanticism.« less