Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats - Hardcover

Miles, Barry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080506043X ISBN 13: 9780805060430

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 1998

Synopsis

An intimate biography of the writer who has become an American icon. More than fifty years after the publication of On the Road, Jack Kerouac is more read and revered by a new generation than ever before. Why this is so is the subject of Barry Miles's fresh and revealing portrait of the writer who is the acknowledged leader of the Beat movement, the group of writers that included Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who together influenced the direction of writing and culture more than any group of artists since England's Bloomsbury. From his birth in blue-collar Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922 to his years at Columbia University during World War II where he first met Allen Ginsberg and all the wild times that followed with friends such as Neal Cassady and Gary Snyder, here is the story of Jack Kerouac's life as never told before. Barry Miles draws on his close friendship with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs to offer new insight into both the exuberance and dismay of the man who inspired a whole generation to take to the road. Kerouac is now an icon, an image, an attitude, and a new generation looks to him as a symbol of freedom. Barry Miles shows us Kerouac the man and Kerouac the leg, his longing for greatness and the consequences of achieving it.

About this title

About the Author

Barry Miles (known as Miles) ran a bookstore in London in the 1960s devoted to Beat literature and was a close fri of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. He is the author of Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now.

Reviews

Making bricks without straw is a phrase that suggests a product empty of data, but Miles, biographer of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and once proprietor of a "Beat" bookshop in London, has made the process work in the case of Kerouac. Apparently unable to quote from more than a few scraps of turned to other sources to limn Kerouac's sex-obsessed, alcohol-sodden and drug-overdosed life. A striking portrait emerges of the author of On the Road (1957). Composing prolifically on teletype rolls, Kerouac produced what he thought of as spontaneous writingAbarely fictional reportage about the lives of his self-styled "Beat" (for beatific) generation. Outwardly virile, looking like a mill-town Canuck lumberjack, Kerouac was, Miles contends, "infantilised by his mother and unable to behave as an adult." Miles sees the mark of mutual Oedipal feelings in Kerouac's work and in his overheated life with his mother, to whom he always returned. Miles concedes that Kerouac's writing is "often splendid" and influential, but he dismisses most of it as self-indulgent concoctions for a market that the Beats created for themselves. A little more about this marketing would have made his book a more welcome addition to the Kerouac biography shelf, already crammed with such titles as Ann Charters's Kerouac, Gerald Nicosia's Memory Babe and Ellis Amburn's Subterranean Kerouac.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Miles paints an unflattering portrait of Kerouac in this, his third biography on a major writer of the Beat Generation (e.g., William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, LJ 8/93). Viewing Kerouac as "insensitive, selfish, and cowardly," an alcoholic with a deep-seated Oedipal complex who remained "a perpetual adolescent," he chastises him for his racism, his misogyny, and his failure to accept responsibility for his daughter (novelist Jan Kerouac, Trainsong, LJ 3/1/88), who died in 1996. This iconoclastic approach aside, Miles's portrait differs little from earlier biographies on the details of Kerouac's life. However, he is particularly good at exploring Kerouac's complex relationships with other Beat writers and illuminating the cultural and historical contexts surrounding the Beat movement. His descriptions of Times Square in the 1940s and his comments on jazz, McCarthyism, and the cult of Edgar Cayce provide helpful background for younger readers. Recommended for all literature collections.AWilliam Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080506043X
• ISBN 13: 9780805060430
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352