What do you think?
Rate this book
Departed Angels: The Lost Paintings
This first-ever collection of Jack Kerouac's visual art includes nearly every existing full-color painting collected and preserved by the Kerouac estate in Lowell, Massachusetts. Also included are dozens of black-and-white line drawings, sketches, and facsimile reproductions of Kerouac's notations from his unpublished notebooks. In writing, Kerouac's restless and relentless experimentation—what he called "spontaneous bop prosody"—pushed language to the boundaries of meaning. In painting and drawing he found a complementary means of expression. A friend and admirer of painters Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, Franz Kline, and Dody Muller, Kerouac was an ardent and deliberate student who worked to develop and refine his skills and his conception of the act of painting—a conception related to the spontaneous composition he had pioneered in his books. Ed Adler's essay offers an unprecedented view of Kerouac, the visual artist. Rich in anecdote and drawing on extensive quotation from Kerouac's letters, notebooks, and published writings, Adler's essay demonstrates the biographical and thematic preoccupations common to Kerouac's writing and painting, especially Kerouac's struggle to integrate the two spiritual traditions, Catholicism and Buddhism, to which he was devoted. No consideration of Kerouac will be complete without reference to this heretofor- unseen aspect of his life and work.
- GenresArtNonfiction
224 pages, Paperback
First published November 24, 2004
119 people want to read
About the author
Jack Kerouac
361 books11.6k followersJean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.
Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes.
Kerouac is recognized for his style of stream of consciousness spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, travel, promiscuity, life in New York City, Buddhism, drugs, and poverty. He became an underground celebrity and, with other Beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements. He has a lasting legacy, greatly influencing many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Jerry Garcia and The Doors.
In 1969, at the age of 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking. Since then, his literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published.
Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes.
Kerouac is recognized for his style of stream of consciousness spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, travel, promiscuity, life in New York City, Buddhism, drugs, and poverty. He became an underground celebrity and, with other Beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements. He has a lasting legacy, greatly influencing many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Jerry Garcia and The Doors.
In 1969, at the age of 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking. Since then, his literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 4, 2013
By now, you're probably aware that I'm a Kerouac fan - I'm big on the Beat scene, and Kerouac is probably the most widely-read and iconic author to emerge from it. Departed Angels shows a different side of Jack's multi-faceted personality - it shows his deeply artistic side.
Jack was friends with a crazy bunch of celebrated writers and artists, many of which were immortalised under pseudonyms in his novels. William Burroughs, another writer friend, also created works of art - he placed cans of paint in front of canvasses and blasted them with shotgun shells. As you do.
Unfortunately, Kerouac's artwork just isn't that good - sure, he's better than me, but he'll never rank up there amongst the greats. Many of his drawings look like a child's first exploratory scribbles, and even the best of them look a little untidy. Of course, he adopted the same stream of consciousness approach for his artwork as he did for his writing, so you can't judge him too harshly.
It's just strange how Ed Adler, the book's compiler and former brother-in-law to Kerouac, seems to think that Jack possesses some great artistic talent to rival Picasso and Matisse. That's just simply not true.
Finally, let me explain the layout - the first half of the book is given over to Kerouac's drawings and paintings, and you can read through it in an hour or so, give or take ten minutes. The second half consists of a long, dry essay by Adler which looks at each of the drawings in turn. Do yourself a favour - skip it.
Jack was friends with a crazy bunch of celebrated writers and artists, many of which were immortalised under pseudonyms in his novels. William Burroughs, another writer friend, also created works of art - he placed cans of paint in front of canvasses and blasted them with shotgun shells. As you do.
Unfortunately, Kerouac's artwork just isn't that good - sure, he's better than me, but he'll never rank up there amongst the greats. Many of his drawings look like a child's first exploratory scribbles, and even the best of them look a little untidy. Of course, he adopted the same stream of consciousness approach for his artwork as he did for his writing, so you can't judge him too harshly.
It's just strange how Ed Adler, the book's compiler and former brother-in-law to Kerouac, seems to think that Jack possesses some great artistic talent to rival Picasso and Matisse. That's just simply not true.
Finally, let me explain the layout - the first half of the book is given over to Kerouac's drawings and paintings, and you can read through it in an hour or so, give or take ten minutes. The second half consists of a long, dry essay by Adler which looks at each of the drawings in turn. Do yourself a favour - skip it.
July 20, 2025
I am a simple woman: I see Niche Beat Content, I read.
I don't particularly care about the quality of Kerouac's art, which a more discerning art critic might raise an eyebrow at, it's all part of the Lore. & I live for that damn Lore......
Admittedly I found the text element of the book, analysing every little scrawl in detail, a bit of a drag at times ~ I think there was an issue of 'overanalysis' which is perhaps antithetical to the Kerouac ethos. But I was interested in the context behind it, & the connections to various episodes of art history in the Beat era & beyond. I can never know too much!
Kerouac would hate that some of these ludicrous sketches got preserved & printed in a book though...... oh well, what's he gonna do about it but bemoan his own celebrity from the grave.
I don't particularly care about the quality of Kerouac's art, which a more discerning art critic might raise an eyebrow at, it's all part of the Lore. & I live for that damn Lore......
Admittedly I found the text element of the book, analysing every little scrawl in detail, a bit of a drag at times ~ I think there was an issue of 'overanalysis' which is perhaps antithetical to the Kerouac ethos. But I was interested in the context behind it, & the connections to various episodes of art history in the Beat era & beyond. I can never know too much!
Kerouac would hate that some of these ludicrous sketches got preserved & printed in a book though...... oh well, what's he gonna do about it but bemoan his own celebrity from the grave.
July 22, 2025
I enjoyed looking at Jack’s drawings and paintings but appreciated less the following discourse “explaining” them. I don’t know if this is what he would have wanted, even if the intention was to celebrate his visual art.
…
“The Beat Generation… may have been an endeavor to broaden their anthropological explorations and reportorial observations and venture out into the vast alternative sensual hemisphere beyond the limits of the dialectic, beyond verbiage and vocabulary, beyond the lexiconical limits of text, beyond words themselves, to a place where they could find that ineffable extra to flesh out and more fully evolve the totality of their lives.”
What a time to be alive!
…
“The Beat Generation… may have been an endeavor to broaden their anthropological explorations and reportorial observations and venture out into the vast alternative sensual hemisphere beyond the limits of the dialectic, beyond verbiage and vocabulary, beyond the lexiconical limits of text, beyond words themselves, to a place where they could find that ineffable extra to flesh out and more fully evolve the totality of their lives.”
What a time to be alive!
September 14, 2009
While Jack Kerouac isn't the best artist by far, it's still an interesting book that embodies a lot of the ideals from the Beats.
July 10, 2011
I loved the drawings as much/more than the paintings. I never knew. What an intense and versatile man.
December 12, 2012
This collection of Kerouac's scribbles, drawings, and paintings are great. One of the neatest things I have seen.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews