Kerouac

Tune in, all you desolation angels and dharma bums, and turn on to Paul Maher's jazzy bio of Kerouac.

With enormous sensitivity and thoughtfulness, Paul Maher Jr. captures the essence of Jack Kerouac's peripatetic life on the margins of American society. Maher brings together those curious personalities and bizarre places that made Kerouac an intensely complex man, perceptive writer, and, ultimately, cultural icon of the 'beat' generation. This riveting biography is meticulously researched, vividly written and a substantial contribution to American cultural history.

Paul Maher has unearthed a plethora of fascinating new information. He is, without question, one of the new leaders in interpreting the life of this literary legend whose reputation grows daily.

What makes Paul Maher's story of Jack Kerouac ... stand out from other Kerouac biographies is his factual tone and his reliance on formal evidence in recounting Kerouac's life and making a case for his place in American letters.

Maher succeeds on many levels and nails the advertised "definitive biography."

The virtues of Kerouac are its concise prose style, inclusion of unpublished work by Kerouac, and refutation of anecdotal material uncritically accepted and printed as fact by previous biographers.

Maher takes a riveting look at the forces that shaped Kerouac's development into the original hipster artist.

Sheds new light on a writer of considerable interest.

Kerouac is an engaging mix of anecdote and archive. Tales of ecstacy and despair, of drugs and drunkenness and poetry, are counterbalanced by Maher's perceptive commentary and criticism.

Unique among Kerouac biographers for his prodigious archival research, Paul Maher tells a magnificant American story of a small-town boy who loved books, created himself as a writer, and destroyed himself. You can spot-check a month or year in this rigorously chronological documentation, or, better, seat yourself for the whole inspiring, infuriating, appalling story. Taking his hint from Kerouac's famous scroll, the ruthlessly non-judgmental Maher unrolls a panorama where squalid settings are thronged by a gaudy, self-indulgent, yet profoundly creative literary generation held at bay by baffled editors, publishers, and critics.