Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, And America

by Dennis McNally

"A blockbuster of a biography . . . absolutely magnificent."-- San Francisco Chronicle




Jack Kerouac--"King of the Beats," unwitting catalyst for the '60s counterculture, groundbreaking author--was a complex and compelling a star athlete with a literary bent; a spontaneous writer vilified by the New Critics but adored by a large, youthful readership; a devout Catholic but aspiring Buddhist; a lover of freedom plagued by crippling alcoholism.





Desolate Angel follows Kerouac from his childhood in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, to his early years at Columbia where he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, beginning a four-way friendship that would become a sociointellectual legend. In rich detail and with sensitivity, Dennis McNally recounts Kerouac's frenetic cross-country journeys, his experiments with drugs and sexuality, his travels to Mexico and Tangier, the sudden fame that followed the publication of On the Road, the years of literary triumph, and the final near-decade of frustration and depression.




Desolate Angel is a harrowing, compassionate portrait of a man and an artist set in an extraordinary social context. The metamorphosis of America from the Great Depression to the Kennedy administration is not merely the backdrop for Kerouac's life but is revealed to be an essential element of his art . . . for Kerouac was above all a witness to his exceptional times.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, The United States Of America, Literature, Unfinished, Reference

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Dennis McNally, author, historian, and longtime publicist for the Grateful Dead, was born into the singular world of the postwar military-industrial complex. The son of an Army counterintelligence officer and a determined mother who pursued a college degree even while battling terminal cancer, McNally’s early years were shaped by frequent relocations, both in the U.S. and abroad, and by a growing awareness of American culture and history. After an education that culminated in graduate studies at the University of Massachusetts, he broke with academic convention by choosing his dissertation topic early: the life and work of Jack Kerouac. His resulting biography, Desolate Angel, published in 1979, impressed Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia, who later invited McNally to write the band’s authorized history.
That invitation led to McNally becoming the Dead’s publicist in 1984 and eventually publishing A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, a definitive chronicle of the band’s cultural impact. His decades-long immersion in the Dead community brought him close to its central figures and events, from backstage encounters to personal friendships, including his marriage to photographer Susana Millman.
After Garcia’s death in 1995 and the eventual disbanding of Grateful Dead Productions in 2004, McNally continued working in the music world, supporting artists and organizations whose work resonated with his values and taste. Today, he remains an active presence in the world of music publicity, especially in the jam band and Americana scenes, while continuing to reflect on the unique intersections of culture, music, and American identity that have defined his life and career.

Reviews

[Ed]

That fact that Jerry Garcia asked McNally to write about the Grateful Dead after reading this book; telling him that his insights about Neal Cassidy were the same as Garcia's, was enough of a recommendation for me to go out and find this book. I have not been disappointed. So far I'm finding it a factual, readable narrative.

[Joseph Egan · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than anything, I found this to be a terrifying cautionary tale.

[Cheryl McEnaney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely well-researched and written, this book gives a remarkably intimate sense of Kerouac's personal complexity and intense artistic dedication. It also brilliantly brings to life Ginsberg, Cassady, Burroughs, Corso, and various other contemporaries of the "Beat" era, following them with great articulation through the morphing social contexts of their active decades, and drawing interesting parallels to musicians and visual artists of their time. A very impressive work.

[Craig Rowland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America [1] by Dennis McNally was published in 1979. As the title states, this is more than a biography of Kerouac but a history of his Beat contemporaries and how they all fit within the nation as a whole. The lives of Kerouac’s intimate friends such as Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady were fleshed out which gave them a solid place in literary history instead of being merely peripheral figures. McNally also profiled other writers, poets and friends in the Kerouac circle such as William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lucien Carr and Carolyn Cassady. In spite of these additional details I found this book an unfortunately slow read. This had nothing to do with my recent read of another Kerouac biography. If anything, I think that two biographies about the same person read almost in succession would lead to a faster read of the second. Yet Desolate Angel was so boring. I’d have thought that tales of Kerouac jumping free rides on trains, crisscrossing the US, his family’s never-ending series of moving house and his stoned times in Mexico would be exciting reading. It wasn’t until well past the halfway mark, when McNally wrote about the success of On the Road and Kerouac’s inability to deal with the attendant fame, that it became interesting to the degree that I couldn’t put the book down (but only so much for me to up my rating of the book from two to three stars out of five).

Kerouac loathed the media’s misappropriation the Beat label and this was a challenge for him whenever he appeared in person or on television. He had an image to sustain yet it was not what his interviewers were making it out to be. “Beat” did not mean dropout, lack of ambition and delinquent, however near the end of his life Kerouac was fulfilling this very impression with his public drunkenness and behaviour. He was even arrested several times for it. McNally portrayed Kerouac as a drunk throughout the entire decade of the 1960’s, and he was thorough in his reporting of brawls, confrontations, TV appearances and letter exchanges where Kerouac fueled himself on Dutch courage.

A surname like Kerouac is Celtic in origin and Jack, whose parents were both Québécois, traced his ancestors back to Brittany. I was most interested in Kerouac’s exploration of his Breton heritage but his constant state of intoxication resulted in an endless string of non-starters. McNally told of countless trips Kerouac took, often crisscrossing the US with the intention of visiting friends or to do work, only to turn around as soon as he got there.

As I have several Kerouac novels in my library still unread, I appreciated the detailed backstories McNally provided, such as:

“Just after he returned to Florida, Jack sat at the typewriter for a week with a bottle of cognac at his side and produced a new work, Satori in Paris. It was the first time he’d written while drinking, and it showed.”

It’s good to know this, as I have this book in my collection. I’ll be more inclined to let things go, and not pull my hair out trying to get into Kerouac’s mind to understand what he had written, now that I know that he was drunk while writing it.

Neither of the other Kerouac biographies I had read talked at great length about his funeral. As I read about the guests and tributes I was left with a profound sadness and as I finished the final paragraph I might have had a good cry had I been somewhere else.

This book was worth reading if you can tolerate the slow pace that painted Kerouac’s life before On the Road. I raced through the rest of the biography but it was sad that McNally only made Kerouac’s life interesting when he was transformed into an unkempt alcoholic who hung out in bars and told everyone off.

I probably will shed some tears for him on his one hundredth birthday. I admire Kerouac’s talent as a writer and as a scholar of literature but he wasted his life away on booze.

[1] The title page omits A Biography as seen on the cover.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A complex character. The years after success were hard to read about. Jack really was a tragic alcoholic during his later years. A few times he got beat up for "talking n*gger" at black establishments. He loved Charlie Parker and other jazz greats. He hung out with abstract expressionist painters.

His relationship with the real-life characters from On The Road faded greatly after his success which came in 1958, 6 years after writing On the Road.

He inspired many people to wake up to reality and that the America as seen on TV was not real America. America was rich and dirty. There was spirit and adventure to be had.

He went through a period of obsession with Buddhism that affected him for life. He was obsessed with Catholicism and with his mother with whom he lived until he died.

I'd imagine that death was a relief to him except that he died from blood vessel hemorrhage which does not seem ideal.

I think he had a lust for life and a curiosity. I think he wanted authenticity. He is the grandfather of people who want to be free and who appreciate the finer things and who are curious and who are horny and who dream and put in the work and who set out and who are inspired by spirit.

He and his friends for a time dealt with the matters of the saints. They spent time with these questions of morality and conduct and duty. They knew the texts, the Gita, the Bible. They knew the prophets. They were prophets to an extent. Imperfect saints.

[Tom Walsh]

I stared this book today. "Jean" Kerouac had a Catholic upbringing and was darkly affected by the death of his younger brother, who he adored. His younger days were sadder than I ever imagined. He was, truly, a poet of the streets. I can begin to see where "On The Road" originated. Recommended to all who like The Beats.

[Julia]

Really good! I just loved reading all of the beats, despite the fact that they were sexist SOB's.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I met McNally backstage at a Ratdog show and because of that, I got to shake Bob Weir's hand. Oh and this is a great read too. So many ridiculous stories.

[Jay Jasch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye, mind, heart opening experience. Total spooky synchronicity throughout.

[Donald · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poor Jack. A victim of his own success.
This is a very thourogh biography of Jack Kerouac, and it has quite a bit about the other people in the "Beat" movement, and a little bit about the events and people that shaped the times. Jack is the focus of the book, and his story, to me, is a sad one. It's just a shame that his personal demons ended up overshadowing his literary genius. I visited his grave in 2001, and mourned all of this before. And 19 years haven't changed how I feel.

Some lighthearted rememberances in here too! My favorite was this quote, as it combines my love of baseball with my love of Kerouac: Jack “... defended Ted Williams and attacked baseball’s Boudreau shift (which put virtually the entire team on one side of the field to stop Ted) as “unnatural,”...” I totally agree with the man, as those shifts are now so commonplace in the game. I hate the shifts!!!


“Goodbye, drunken ghost.” "Above all else, the road endures."

[Sami Eerola · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good biography about Jack Kerouac. I did not like the stream of consciousness style of writing in this book. It only works in novels, not in non-ficion. Some times it was difficult to understand what was happening and why. For example i totally missed why Kerouac wrote "On the road" in toilet paper. But still this book captures perfectly the beat-writters personality and depression. Big bonus is the impartiality of this book. Kerouac was a weird men, with antisemitic, fascists, conservative and liberal views. Hated politics, but supported Nixon. Started the 60's counter culture, but hated hippies.

[Straker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good enough for what it is but the author is hamstrung by the dissolute nature of Kerouac’s life, forcing him to recount endless episodes of drunken squalor and humiliation. As for the subject himself, well if you’re interested in tracking the intellectual decline of the United States, the (eventual) acclaim accorded to Kerouac and his cohorts is as good a place to start as any. Call it 3.5 stars.

[Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great biography of Jack Kerouac and the time of The Beats. The author does a good job and includes new information and perspective. Even though I’ve read several similar books I couldn’t put this one down.

[Kalle Wescott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read /Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, And America/, by Dennis McNally:

https://www.dennismcnally.com/books/d...

Wow. Now I need to read the Kerouac books I haven't read yet.

[David Burns · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The myths and dreams and the art remain, to disturb or inspire. Above all else, the road endures."

[Sean Desmond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beyond superb.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid bio of Jack Kerouac, but falls short when it comes to the rest of The Beat Generation and America.

[Library Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-researched and great writing, I really enjoy McNally's books.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel torn when I consider this book. See, I think it was a good book, and clearly well researched. However, having read about four other Kerouac biographies, plus Go, plus Carolyn Cassady's Off the Road, I really feel like I was just hearing the same story again with a few more details thrown in here and there, while some other things were glossed over a bit.

I suppose more than anything I was a bit let down by the fact that, to my taste, the author didn't really go all that in depth in connecting Kerouac and his works to the shifting American landscape. Yes, there were references here and there, but I was hoping that would be more the focus of this book rather than strict biography.

If you haven't read Kerouac biographies, check this one out, but if you've read as much on Kerouac as I have, I wouldn't say it's a must-read.

[Doug Eymer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tom Davis of the comedy duo, Franken & Davis, recently passed away. I was watching a video of a presentation Tom gave in 2009. On stage with him was Dennis McNally, who has been involved with The Grateful Dead for 30+ years.

Prior to his involvement with The Dead, he researched the life of Jack Kerouac. I have always wanted to read Kerouac's, On the Road but felt that this book would be helpful in preparing for that task.

Amazing book.

[Sam Mills · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poorly edited, inaccurate. Author consistently uses the word "bitch" and "bitched" instead of "complain" or "complained." Kerouac's girlfriend Alene Lee is referred to by the name of her fictional counterpart "Mardou Fox" from The Subterraneans, with "Alene Lee" missing altogether from the index. That error alone calls the rest of his research into question.

[rebecca hutchinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

He tells no lies

He tells no lies

yes I would recommend this book why not it's jacks story ,why did he let his mother Controll him what about his daughter, any will sad in a way that he ended up ,was he ever happy didn't like his mother loved his friends and jack needed love not the bottle

[Mirva · Rating 2 out of 5]

If I hadn't been so interested in Kerouac, then I would never have finished this book, because it was pretty badly written. Too melodramatic, too depressing (although I admit, the life of an alcoholic probably isn't great).

[Aaron Novak · Rating 5 out of 5]

The definitive Kerouac biography. A great read - informative, insightful, comprehensive, sympathetic. I'm embarrassed that I had not read this book earlier. Thankfully a friend bought this for me as a gift and set me straight. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

[Elyssa · Rating 4 out of 5]

After immersing myself in Kerouac's writings, it was interesting to learn about the man behind the novels and realize that he is very different from the characters he created to portray himself.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best biographies I've read.

[Matt Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of my very first books

[GK Stritch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful bio of a "larger than life character of astounding erudition and honesty," that ends in sadness.