The book is a first-person retelling of the author’s 17-day motorcycle trip from Minneapolis to San Francisco, which he made together with his young son Chris. At the same time, the author shares with the reader his idea of “quality” as the hidden essence of things.
Now the legendary American writer, a former Beatnik, a thinker, a moralist, a recluse, a Zen Buddhist, Robert Maynard Pirsig rarely appears in public and gives interviews reluctantly. The novel “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” published in 1974, made its author—formerly a scientific and technical documentation compiler—a true spiritual leader of an entire generation.