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Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats
More than forty years after the publication of On the Road, Jack Kerouac is more widely 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 Beats, the group of writers that included Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Gary Snyder, who together influenced the direction of writing and culture more than any group of artists since England's Bloomsbury.
Drawing on Kerouac's close friendship and conversations with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Miles offers provocative new insights into both the exuberance and the dismay of Kerouac, a man full of contradictions who was surprisingly conventional despite his longing to rebel. The Kerouac who emerges is deeper, darker, and more fascinating than any we've ever known. Kerouac is now an icon, an image, an attitude, and Barry Miles convincingly conveys his longing for greatness and the consequences of achieving it.
Drawing on Kerouac's close friendship and conversations with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Miles offers provocative new insights into both the exuberance and the dismay of Kerouac, a man full of contradictions who was surprisingly conventional despite his longing to rebel. The Kerouac who emerges is deeper, darker, and more fascinating than any we've ever known. Kerouac is now an icon, an image, an attitude, and Barry Miles convincingly conveys his longing for greatness and the consequences of achieving it.
332 pages, Paperback
First published May 21, 1998
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About the author
Barry Miles
75 books152 followersBarry Miles is an English author best known for his deep involvement in the 1960s counterculture and for chronicling the era through his prolific writing. He played a key role in shaping and documenting the London underground scene, becoming a central figure among the poets, musicians, and artists who defined the decade’s rebellious spirit. A close associate of figures such as Allen Ginsberg and Paul McCartney, Miles not only witnessed the cultural revolution firsthand but also actively participated in it through ventures like the Indica Gallery and the alternative newspaper International Times.
In the early 1960s, Miles began working at Better Books in London, a progressive bookshop that became a hub for the avant-garde. While there, he was instrumental in organizing the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, an event that marked the emergence of the British underground movement and featured prominent poets like Allen Ginsberg. The same year, Miles co-founded the Indica Bookshop and Gallery, which became a gathering place for creatives and countercultural icons. It was here that John Lennon first met Yoko Ono, at one of her art exhibitions.
Miles also played a role in launching International Times, one of the UK’s first underground newspapers, which Paul McCartney discreetly funded. Miles introduced McCartney to the people behind the project and facilitated many of his early connections with the underground scene. In 1967, he co-organized The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, a legendary multimedia event at Alexandra Palace featuring Pink Floyd, Yoko Ono, and John Lennon, among others.
Later in the decade, Miles took on the management of Zapple Records, an experimental subsidiary of Apple Records. During this time, he produced poetry albums, including one by Richard Brautigan. However, his personal relationship with Brautigan became strained after Miles became romantically involved with Brautigan’s partner, Valerie Estes. The fallout led to communication only through legal representatives. Although Zapple closed before releasing the Brautigan album, it was eventually issued by another label in 1970.
Miles also produced a recording of Allen Ginsberg’s musical interpretation of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, which was released in 1970. He briefly lived with Ginsberg in New York before returning to England following the breakdown of his first marriage. He later married travel writer Rosemary Bailey and continued to live and work in London.
In addition to his memoirs In the Sixties and In the Seventies, Miles has written definitive biographies of cultural icons such as Paul McCartney (Many Years From Now), Frank Zappa, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, and Allen Ginsberg. He is also the author of Hippie, a visual and narrative exploration of the 1960s counterculture. His writings often reflect a mix of personal experience and historical documentation, offering insight into the worlds of rock, literature, and art.
Miles is known not only for his historical accounts but also for his critical views, including pointed commentary on musicians like Rush and Frank Zappa, examining the political and commercial aspects of their work. With a career that spans over five decades, Barry Miles remains one of the most insightful chroniclers of the countercultural and musical revolutions of the 20th century.
In the early 1960s, Miles began working at Better Books in London, a progressive bookshop that became a hub for the avant-garde. While there, he was instrumental in organizing the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, an event that marked the emergence of the British underground movement and featured prominent poets like Allen Ginsberg. The same year, Miles co-founded the Indica Bookshop and Gallery, which became a gathering place for creatives and countercultural icons. It was here that John Lennon first met Yoko Ono, at one of her art exhibitions.
Miles also played a role in launching International Times, one of the UK’s first underground newspapers, which Paul McCartney discreetly funded. Miles introduced McCartney to the people behind the project and facilitated many of his early connections with the underground scene. In 1967, he co-organized The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, a legendary multimedia event at Alexandra Palace featuring Pink Floyd, Yoko Ono, and John Lennon, among others.
Later in the decade, Miles took on the management of Zapple Records, an experimental subsidiary of Apple Records. During this time, he produced poetry albums, including one by Richard Brautigan. However, his personal relationship with Brautigan became strained after Miles became romantically involved with Brautigan’s partner, Valerie Estes. The fallout led to communication only through legal representatives. Although Zapple closed before releasing the Brautigan album, it was eventually issued by another label in 1970.
Miles also produced a recording of Allen Ginsberg’s musical interpretation of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, which was released in 1970. He briefly lived with Ginsberg in New York before returning to England following the breakdown of his first marriage. He later married travel writer Rosemary Bailey and continued to live and work in London.
In addition to his memoirs In the Sixties and In the Seventies, Miles has written definitive biographies of cultural icons such as Paul McCartney (Many Years From Now), Frank Zappa, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, and Allen Ginsberg. He is also the author of Hippie, a visual and narrative exploration of the 1960s counterculture. His writings often reflect a mix of personal experience and historical documentation, offering insight into the worlds of rock, literature, and art.
Miles is known not only for his historical accounts but also for his critical views, including pointed commentary on musicians like Rush and Frank Zappa, examining the political and commercial aspects of their work. With a career that spans over five decades, Barry Miles remains one of the most insightful chroniclers of the countercultural and musical revolutions of the 20th century.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
June 24, 2025
A Tarnished King
Barry Miles' biography "Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats" (1999) is part of an unceasing flow of writings about Kerouac and about the Beat movement which he helped to inspire. Miles's book is valuable because it explains why people continue to read Kerouac and the beats and also focuses on the limitations of the movement, I think, through discussion of Kerouac as a person.
Kerouac was first and foremost a writer. Miles' book emphasizes this. It discusses virtually each of Kerouac's major works, and minor works as well, in the context of his life -- when, precisely, they were written, what they are about, and where each book fits, in Miles's usually well-considered opinion, in Kerouac's work as a whole. Such writing is more the purview of literary criticism than biography but Miles does it well and it is needed in a consideration of Kerouac's life and work. He focuses on the spiritual side of the beats, their quarrel with conformity, materialism, and repressed sexuality, and their emphasis on feeling and the expression of feeling. Miles properly places Kerouac in the romantic tradition of literature and within American Romanticism in particular as a follower, most immediately, of Thomas Wolfe.
Miles does not spare Kerouac the man, in a discussion that should discourage any tendency to hero-worship or mystification. Kerouac was selfish and inconsiderate of others, adolescent at the core, unduly attached to his mother, on the far fringes of the American right (although he probably deserves to be praised for not adopting the hippie, ultra-left, anti United States attitude of his followers and colleagues), and lead a destructive life, to his own talents and to the lives of people who loved him and had a right to depend upon him, such as his daughter.
As a writer, Kerouac emerges in the book as a person of talent with a vision of American life that is valuable (though hardly unique, I think). He wrote well but too much and too carelessly and too much under the influence of drugs. He also, as Miles suggests was overly dogmatic and rigid in his use of spontaneous prose.
The beats were a unique literary movement and Kerouac was an integral part of it. His books, I think will continue to be read and valued not for the most part as literary masterpieces, but as expressing the mood of a generation. There is much in them that is worthwhile. Miles' portrait of Kerouac and his work is judicious. It also encourages the reader to explore Kerouac's writings for his or herself, which is the goal of any good biography of a writer.
Robin Friedman
Barry Miles' biography "Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats" (1999) is part of an unceasing flow of writings about Kerouac and about the Beat movement which he helped to inspire. Miles's book is valuable because it explains why people continue to read Kerouac and the beats and also focuses on the limitations of the movement, I think, through discussion of Kerouac as a person.
Kerouac was first and foremost a writer. Miles' book emphasizes this. It discusses virtually each of Kerouac's major works, and minor works as well, in the context of his life -- when, precisely, they were written, what they are about, and where each book fits, in Miles's usually well-considered opinion, in Kerouac's work as a whole. Such writing is more the purview of literary criticism than biography but Miles does it well and it is needed in a consideration of Kerouac's life and work. He focuses on the spiritual side of the beats, their quarrel with conformity, materialism, and repressed sexuality, and their emphasis on feeling and the expression of feeling. Miles properly places Kerouac in the romantic tradition of literature and within American Romanticism in particular as a follower, most immediately, of Thomas Wolfe.
Miles does not spare Kerouac the man, in a discussion that should discourage any tendency to hero-worship or mystification. Kerouac was selfish and inconsiderate of others, adolescent at the core, unduly attached to his mother, on the far fringes of the American right (although he probably deserves to be praised for not adopting the hippie, ultra-left, anti United States attitude of his followers and colleagues), and lead a destructive life, to his own talents and to the lives of people who loved him and had a right to depend upon him, such as his daughter.
As a writer, Kerouac emerges in the book as a person of talent with a vision of American life that is valuable (though hardly unique, I think). He wrote well but too much and too carelessly and too much under the influence of drugs. He also, as Miles suggests was overly dogmatic and rigid in his use of spontaneous prose.
The beats were a unique literary movement and Kerouac was an integral part of it. His books, I think will continue to be read and valued not for the most part as literary masterpieces, but as expressing the mood of a generation. There is much in them that is worthwhile. Miles' portrait of Kerouac and his work is judicious. It also encourages the reader to explore Kerouac's writings for his or herself, which is the goal of any good biography of a writer.
Robin Friedman
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December 17, 2007Most overrated writer/movement ever? Maybe. These guys are just fuck-ups. Silver spoon kids (mostly) with really high IQs, who lacked work ethic, self control, and integrity/morals. Why do people suck off the Beats so much? Is it because they did so many drugs? Wow. Super. Is it because they all slept with each other and homosexuality is interesting and cool? Fuck off. Is it because they went on road trips? I went on a road trip. Is it because Kerouac wanted to fuck his mom and Oedipus complexes are so interesting and relevant? In a 20th century context, sorry, but Oedipus complexes are just disgusting.
There's a lot of revisionist history associated with the Beats. Why their lifestyle is so romanticized now is beyond me.
There's a lot of revisionist history associated with the Beats. Why their lifestyle is so romanticized now is beyond me.
December 8, 2019
My Relationship with Kerouac started a great many years ago. On a dusty shelf, I came across a copy of On The Road. As a teenage boy, it was something I devoured hole looking into every corner for its secrets and its endless sense of freedom and adventure. Over the years I have gone back to it many times to reread. I think at this point I have read it more times than any other. But my feelings towards it have changed a great deal since I first opened that book. No longer seeing so much of the freedom and more is a wanton disregard for those people's lives he destroys along the way. How all it really cares for is his own kicks. But this is no just a one book affair with me. I have a shelf full of his works. And yes you can see how his views on the world and people did change but for me, there is always a selfish undercurrent attributed to his work. This is not to say they are bad, between Kerouac and his friends the defined an era and they have a place in the world they are for want of a better word problematic in the gaze of the modern world.
I picked up this book because after all these years of only caring about the stories I thought maybe it was time to peel back the cover and see what the man himself was really like. It has to be said I was aware of Kerouac's reputation or at least some of it. I suppose he is one of those writers that has a myth wrapped around him as this amazingly crazy genius who found true freedom in running around America as it was with not a care in the world. What Miles does is show me the real man for better or worse, and having finished this book there was defiantly a lot of worse. I think there is a reason that not only in his books but to a greater extent in real life he was always on the move. Never staying in one place too long. While you may get spun a yard about his reasons for all this it strikes me that he was a man running away from himself. He could never seem to cope with whop he was and in doing so treated those around him with a great deal of contempt. He is someone i at least had always imagined sitting down and having a drink and talking into the wee hours with. But now I feel that I probably would have gotten annoyed with him far before the sun came up.
Much like all of us Kerouac is a complicated person, I think that as a body of work it stands on its own two legs Giving us insight into a time and place that has moved on but maybe not changed all that much. They still exist but have morphed into something new after all the Bro culture is not all that different from the beats. Especially in its views on women and where they fit into there world view. There also Jack's views on race which I feel many would find hard to stomach into to days climate. And yes we can say that it was a different time that people's views than where stretched by the Geopolitical climate. Are we in fact just letting them of all too easy for people who can't defend themselves? Maybe but it does not make it any easier to stomach. I think that it is a good thing that Miles doesn't shy away from this in telling the story of Kerouac. While you can see the respect he has for the stories Kerouac told he is not to idolize him. He wants to show all of us that this is a very human man with all the faults in tow. And while he doesn't cover the hole of Jack's life he gave me plenty to digest.
What this book does is strips away the great myth of the Beat king and gives you the scared and frighten man who spent his life running from not only himself but the fame his books brought. Never finding a place he could truly be free always fighting everyone and everything. It is a book that I think has shown me a great deal in an easy way to digest. So should you wish to go looking for the very real man? For better or worse this book will tick all those boxes.
I picked up this book because after all these years of only caring about the stories I thought maybe it was time to peel back the cover and see what the man himself was really like. It has to be said I was aware of Kerouac's reputation or at least some of it. I suppose he is one of those writers that has a myth wrapped around him as this amazingly crazy genius who found true freedom in running around America as it was with not a care in the world. What Miles does is show me the real man for better or worse, and having finished this book there was defiantly a lot of worse. I think there is a reason that not only in his books but to a greater extent in real life he was always on the move. Never staying in one place too long. While you may get spun a yard about his reasons for all this it strikes me that he was a man running away from himself. He could never seem to cope with whop he was and in doing so treated those around him with a great deal of contempt. He is someone i at least had always imagined sitting down and having a drink and talking into the wee hours with. But now I feel that I probably would have gotten annoyed with him far before the sun came up.
Much like all of us Kerouac is a complicated person, I think that as a body of work it stands on its own two legs Giving us insight into a time and place that has moved on but maybe not changed all that much. They still exist but have morphed into something new after all the Bro culture is not all that different from the beats. Especially in its views on women and where they fit into there world view. There also Jack's views on race which I feel many would find hard to stomach into to days climate. And yes we can say that it was a different time that people's views than where stretched by the Geopolitical climate. Are we in fact just letting them of all too easy for people who can't defend themselves? Maybe but it does not make it any easier to stomach. I think that it is a good thing that Miles doesn't shy away from this in telling the story of Kerouac. While you can see the respect he has for the stories Kerouac told he is not to idolize him. He wants to show all of us that this is a very human man with all the faults in tow. And while he doesn't cover the hole of Jack's life he gave me plenty to digest.
What this book does is strips away the great myth of the Beat king and gives you the scared and frighten man who spent his life running from not only himself but the fame his books brought. Never finding a place he could truly be free always fighting everyone and everything. It is a book that I think has shown me a great deal in an easy way to digest. So should you wish to go looking for the very real man? For better or worse this book will tick all those boxes.
September 3, 2012
I thought this was a really good biography in that it was well-researched, thorough, annotated, interesting and honest. Miles did his homework and also consulted valuable primary sources such as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, themselves. He also included fair criticism of Kerouac's writing which made me more interested to read some of the works that I have overlooked. That being said, parts of this book were very difficult to read. Although I'm always irritated with writers who canonize Kerouac, I don't know if I was ready to read graphic accounts of his deterioration into alchoholism, replete with blow by blow descriptions of racism (he once got his 14 year old nephew to burn a cross they'd erected between a white and black neighborhood--while drunkenly screaming racial slurs) and misogyny. Miles attributes many of Kerouac's demons to an unresolved Oedipal conflict and a really disturbed, enabling and abusive mother, who, in essence, trapped him in a perpetual state of infantilism. While this analysis is well-supported and fascinating, I think Miles could at least have given a nod to the possibility that Kerouac was mentally ill and never got the treatment he needed (given his years of self-medicating with alcohol).
August 26, 2008
Pretty brutal look at a tortured soul.
November 16, 2025
Barry Miles presents here a comprehensive, rounded biography of the eminent Beat writer. Miles places Jack within both the wider socio-political climate of pre- and post-war America and literary context in which his writings fit. The biography presents Jack as a prolific, talented writer, without shying away from the more odious sides of his personality that were - for most of the late-20th century - largely ignored or romanticised. Kerouac was at once a brilliant writer, capturing the zeitgeist with (mostly) remarkable beauty, pushing (often completely dismantling) the conventions of mid-century literature, and at the same time a misogynistic, racist, narcissist whose complete disregard for his friends ended up alienating nearly everybody he knew. Miles is unforgiving in his portrayal of Jack's treatment of his daughter Jan, as well as pretty much every romantic relationship he ever had. And yet, while acknowledging this, without excusing it, there is still something enthralling about Kerouac and the world he built in his writings. The very fact Miles wrote the biography at all is a testament to the encapsulating power of the man and myth.
Perhaps the two most distinctive themes running throughout the book are the role Miles attributes to Allen Ginsberg in preserving (perhaps, to some extent, creating) Kerouac's legacy (a lot of Miles's book seems to draw on Allen for his reflection and recollection of key events), and Kerouac's near-incestuous relationship with his mother. In Jack's own writings, this relationship is often sentimental, but Miles documents the symbiotic relationship between the two, from Kerouac's early internalisation of his mother's deep-seated antisemitism to their simultaneous descent into alcoholism in the late 60s.
Though Miles acknowledges early on how Kerouac's novels are unreliable documents in deciphering the truth about events, he still relies a lot on them to colour the narrative -- particularly in the early 40s. He does not reflect that his own primary sources (chief amongst them Ginsberg, Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and John Clellon Holmes, the latter of which is probably the most virtuous of the entire group) should also not always be taken at their word. Allen's confessional anecdotes about his sexual relationship with Jack is certainly interesting, but these testimonies are impossible to verify. Neither does the book really attempt to tie everything together at the end. After Kerouac's death, the narrative ends somewhat abruptly, and the postscript is dedicated mostly to documenting the wrestlings over his estate.
The book is a little outdated now, with the Original Scroll now publicly available (and published in paperback form), for instance. Nevertheless, in its unapologetic portrait of one of the most influential (and problematic) literary figures of the past 100 years, Miles offers perhaps the best biography of Kerouac to date.
Perhaps the two most distinctive themes running throughout the book are the role Miles attributes to Allen Ginsberg in preserving (perhaps, to some extent, creating) Kerouac's legacy (a lot of Miles's book seems to draw on Allen for his reflection and recollection of key events), and Kerouac's near-incestuous relationship with his mother. In Jack's own writings, this relationship is often sentimental, but Miles documents the symbiotic relationship between the two, from Kerouac's early internalisation of his mother's deep-seated antisemitism to their simultaneous descent into alcoholism in the late 60s.
Though Miles acknowledges early on how Kerouac's novels are unreliable documents in deciphering the truth about events, he still relies a lot on them to colour the narrative -- particularly in the early 40s. He does not reflect that his own primary sources (chief amongst them Ginsberg, Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and John Clellon Holmes, the latter of which is probably the most virtuous of the entire group) should also not always be taken at their word. Allen's confessional anecdotes about his sexual relationship with Jack is certainly interesting, but these testimonies are impossible to verify. Neither does the book really attempt to tie everything together at the end. After Kerouac's death, the narrative ends somewhat abruptly, and the postscript is dedicated mostly to documenting the wrestlings over his estate.
The book is a little outdated now, with the Original Scroll now publicly available (and published in paperback form), for instance. Nevertheless, in its unapologetic portrait of one of the most influential (and problematic) literary figures of the past 100 years, Miles offers perhaps the best biography of Kerouac to date.
July 1, 2020
You know it's bad when William Burroughs comes off as the voice of reason.
A thorough puncturing of the myth, revealing many details that some fans might not enjoy reading about (his relationship with his mother and his friends, treatment of his daughter, etc).
Much more balanced than Joyce Johnson's The Voice is All (and with none of its spite), this is a good place to start if you're interested in learning more about who Jack Kerouac was and why he wrote. Docked 1/2 star for lauding Dr. Sax and Visions of Cody, two very lazy books.
A thorough puncturing of the myth, revealing many details that some fans might not enjoy reading about (his relationship with his mother and his friends, treatment of his daughter, etc).
Much more balanced than Joyce Johnson's The Voice is All (and with none of its spite), this is a good place to start if you're interested in learning more about who Jack Kerouac was and why he wrote. Docked 1/2 star for lauding Dr. Sax and Visions of Cody, two very lazy books.
April 13, 2020
Truly a terrifying portrait of Jack Kerouac. The excellent pacing and choice of details serves well to highlight how extraordinarily despicable he was.
October 15, 2023
Brilliant biography, not only about the most influential writer of the Beat Generation, but also about the whole generation
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September 16, 2024beware, reading biographies about your heroes!
August 27, 2025
Didn’t finish. Will donate. Behind the scenes disturbing insights into jacks love life and mental state. Didn’t enjoy reading but he was a fascination figure.
September 24, 2016
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June 4, 2015
Barry Miles presents a warts and all biography of the Beat Generation's most famous novelist. In fact, Miles biography, while 100% correct and 100% accurate, is the most negative or realist biography I've read of Kerouac and I think I've read them all.
Let's face it, Kerouac was never the man people thought and still he was. In his later years he was conservative, racist, an alcoholic, isolated by his lifestyle and the way he treated people and a horrible father. Miles doesn't hide any of this from the reader. He touches on the abuse that Ginsberg endured but if I was editing, I probably would have presented more of that.
What this bio doesn't do is explain why an asshole like Kerouac clearly was inspired a legion of people around him to maintain their loyalty and remain friends with him (except William Burroughs) nor does it give enough of a picture of why at least his first three or four books are considered masterpieces and used as a guide for life by whole generations of young people.
Miles does present Kerouac as a complicated, fractured person--a better author than a man, but much of his work is ignored, most of his poetry for example, however, given when the book was written, the vaults weren't yet open with a new Kerouac work making its way every few years on the market as they are now.
I would definitely recommend this book, especially if you think the Kerouac lifestyle is one you'd like to replicate.
Let's face it, Kerouac was never the man people thought and still he was. In his later years he was conservative, racist, an alcoholic, isolated by his lifestyle and the way he treated people and a horrible father. Miles doesn't hide any of this from the reader. He touches on the abuse that Ginsberg endured but if I was editing, I probably would have presented more of that.
What this bio doesn't do is explain why an asshole like Kerouac clearly was inspired a legion of people around him to maintain their loyalty and remain friends with him (except William Burroughs) nor does it give enough of a picture of why at least his first three or four books are considered masterpieces and used as a guide for life by whole generations of young people.
Miles does present Kerouac as a complicated, fractured person--a better author than a man, but much of his work is ignored, most of his poetry for example, however, given when the book was written, the vaults weren't yet open with a new Kerouac work making its way every few years on the market as they are now.
I would definitely recommend this book, especially if you think the Kerouac lifestyle is one you'd like to replicate.
September 3, 2012
i wanted to know the person behind the icon before picking up any of Kerouac's books and this book did well to bring me up to speed on the Beat Generation and all its accompanying ideals - literary and philosophical.
author was highly objective in his portraiture of the man (read: harshly critical) and to be frank, i don't have a very good impression of Kerouac after reading this book. am possibly more curious about his contemporaries like Ginsberg or Burroughs. also, i am a massive Bukowski fan, so that's that.
will still continue to pursue Kerouac's work together with the rest of Beat Generation literature due to a personal interest in this period in American history with all its growing pains and teething problems, but i'm clearly not romanticizing it as much as i do Bukowski.
author was highly objective in his portraiture of the man (read: harshly critical) and to be frank, i don't have a very good impression of Kerouac after reading this book. am possibly more curious about his contemporaries like Ginsberg or Burroughs. also, i am a massive Bukowski fan, so that's that.
will still continue to pursue Kerouac's work together with the rest of Beat Generation literature due to a personal interest in this period in American history with all its growing pains and teething problems, but i'm clearly not romanticizing it as much as i do Bukowski.
August 22, 2008
I was obsessed with Kerouac during my first two years of high school. I reread this book a couple years ago and generally enjoyed it but not with the same feeling of admiration for the man that I had at 15.
A well done biography nonetheless.
A well done biography nonetheless.
August 4, 2008
Kerouac was a worse guy than I realized. And his mom was a real ballbuster.
April 21, 2010
Pretty dry bio...I'm going to look for a more fun bio to read. I love Kerouac, and Miles kind of drags him in the dust.
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March 28, 2011Jack Kerouac was a fucking asshole, man.
July 31, 2011
Interesting and complete biography. The author doesn't really seem to like Kerouac as a person and honestly, after reading the book, neither did I.
January 6, 2012
An entertaining biography of a reprehensible human being who showed flashes of incredible literary talent.
January 26, 2014
Update as of later.
December 13, 2014
Certainly ruins your image of Kerouac as the cool and lovable mofo but incredibly interesting nonetheless
February 20, 2015
Fascinating study of one very,very complex man.
June 18, 2015
I found this to be a brutal look at the famous writer of On The Road and an interesting insight into his works beyond that. It doesn't encourage you to pursue his works.
October 24, 2012
4,5. Lido em português, na edição da José Olympio.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews