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Kerouac: His Life and Work, by Paul Maher, Jr., is the most recent “big biography” (500+ pages) of the man who wrote On the Road, Big Sur, Doctor Sax, Desolation Angels, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, The Town and the City, Visions of Cody, and another score of lesser known books of fiction, poetry and ruminations. I am a big fan of Kerouac’s works, but I have come to the conclusion that you either like Kerouac, or you don’t like him.  Still, reading On the Road (1957), an important American novel, seems like part of a basic liberal arts education to me.

Maher’s biography is based on access to a good deal more original material (letters, manuscripts, maps, etc.) than most other writers of Kerouac’s story have had access to.  While there is thus more detail here than in, say, Ann Charters’ unauthorized biography of Jack, the detail does not overwhelm the story of a man driven to write – to try to makes sense of – his life story while it was actually happening.  The portraits of Neal and Carolyn Cassady, William Burroughs, and especially Allen Ginsberg are fresh and shed light on all of them.  Jack’s three woeful marriages, his thoroughly unhealthy attachment to his mother, and his odd French-Canadian-Buddhist version of Catholicism are also shown with more clarity than previously, I think.  The scariest part of the book, and a long part it is, deals with Jack’s inability to deal with his own success, his own fame (infamy) as “King of the Beats,” and his ghastly descent into alcoholism, which killed him in his 40s.  Thumbs up for this engaging biography.  Incidentally, for a look at this era through the eyes of another one of the principal players, try Carolyn Cassady’s Off the Road.