Customer Reviews

Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats

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This biography 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 Kedrouac'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 spritual 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 tendendy 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 or a writer.

With Kerouac an industry these days, it is hard to imagine anything new being offered, particularly from a biographer who never (on the strength of this text) even met him.

Well stick with it. As a review on the back on my copy puts it "this is an excellent portrait of a ghastly man."

Barry Miles does not understate Kerouac's influence. He takes him seriously as a writer and stylist, despite the patchiness of his output. His importance, says Miles, lay in his popularising the break with American post-war conformity (On the Road) and his prophesizing a Zen-infused "world full of rucksack wanderers" (The Dharma Bums), which underpinned the more thoughtful end of hippiedom.

No doubt such things would have happened without Kerouac, or any of the beats, but this odd mother-lovin' alcoholic redneck from the small-town north-east undoubtedly flavoured the 60s and 70s and inspired countless thousands of wanderers and artists.

Barry Miles's contribution is to sort through the myth, delivering a freshness to a now largely stale story of genius, self-obsession, and fatal loathing. The accounts of the cold-water flats of 1940s New York are especially vivid, where the beat ethos - much rougher than its hippie godchild - was formed.

With so much sentimentalising of the Kerouac story, this is one for readers who've been moved by the man but want more than the literary postcard.

I thought this book was a very readable overview of Jack Kerouac's life. It helped me gain some kind of overview which I had found elusive reading Gerald Nicosia's more detailed book. However what marred the book for me was Miles's intrusive and over-bearing judgements. Surely it's better to present the facts and let them speak for themselves? In chapter 8 (just over half way through the book) he launches into a tirade ....'How can a man deny his own child?... Where was Kerouac when he should have been reading his daughter bedtime stories, sharing with her his love for words?...' and so on. Unfortunately once he's in this mode he doesn't let up. I appreciate the sentiment and it's difficult not to judge Kerouac harshly over this - but I felt Miles should have made more of an effort to understand his subject. I almost felt I leant more about Barry Miles than Kerouac in this section of the book and it's commendable that Miles feels so strongly about family loyalties but is that really the issue here?

The reviews of this book seem to be an interesting assortment from not that great to great. I felt like I had to plod through this book and at times I'm not sure if it is Miles' writing or just the fact that Kerouac really wasn't all that interesting. Miles starts with Kerouac's family background and then traces 'the king' through his youth and early adulthood and on into notoriety and finally death. Somewhere in there Miles wants us to find the answers to Kerouac's alcoholism, his disregard for women and his complete social withdrawal. But at some point in the book, you start to realize that Kerouac really isn't that interesting. Certainly his writing was far more interesting than he. Miles describes Ginsberg's continuous selling of Kerouac's work and even the man to the point where even Ginsberg seems to be trying to convince himself of his greatness.

This is a book about a writer. Many writers live out their lives through their works. Certainly it seems Kerouac was this way. He never quite seems to grow up. This is almost a psycho-biography into what might have made Kerouac tick.

I think Miles did an excellent job of bringing diverse sources together and building a tapestry of Kerouac's life in view of his works. But in the end, Kerouac seems not to be up to the task.

Do yourself a favor and read Kerouac's books. They are far more interesting.

This book goes into Jack Kerouc's life through the eyes of his friends and people who knew him. This is a three-dimensional portrait of the real man without any of the mythical halo that is starting to build up around him. It's a great book. I definitely learned a lot not only about Jack Kerouac but also about the whole generation.

Miles does an incredible job of putting together the jaded intricate life of an insanely selfish man. Kerouac was an incredible writer, yes, because he scrounged off everyone around him to better his skill. Funny when our heros turn into humans and we begin to feel our own inspiration from it.

If you are a fan of the writing of Jack Kerouac, and want to know more about his life and the stories that were going on while he was writing his books, this is a good place to start. It helps to know a great deal about the Beat generation, and who some of the other people were that were involved in the Beat Generation. I'm a fan of Kerouac's but I don't know anything really about Ginsberg, Snyder, Burroughs, and the other Beat writers, so the book helped me learn a little more about them. My complaints about the book are that it's hard to keep all the people straight. The writer mentions a lot of different people and it's easy to get lost and have to go back and read the back story behind the person again, so that was confusing. But still, it's a very interesting book and it opened my eyes to who Kerouac truly was. The writer doesn't pull punches when it comes to discussing Kerouac's flaws.

This book is a very detailed account of Kerouac's relationships and what motivated his writing. When I was 20 years old in 1959 I was nauseated by the conformity of the times and thought seriously of going to New York City to join the beat scene. I have often wondered what good things might have come out of such a venture. Alas, Barry Miles has cured me of the nostalgia for what might have been.

While drinking binges, pseudo-intellectual conversation and affairs with untold numbers of lady beats appealed to me at the time, I hadn't counted on the absolute lack of social mores required of a true beat as lived by the King of the Beats, Jack Kerouac.

There was Jack with so many friends but friend to no one, sometimes brilliantly expressive but mostly incoherent on drugs or booze, lovingly tied to mother but in a self destructive way, owner of a subconscious respect for law and order yet endlessly cavorting with petty criminals, the picture of male virility but willing to lay with anyone possessing genitals of any kind, driven to go public but unable to do so when coherent, easy to start relationships but never lasting in one, and worst of all, a potentially liberating non conforming attitude coupled with right wing beliefs he could never seem to shake.

If Barry Miles' recounting of Jack is in any way accurate and if Kerouac was in any way typical of the beats, then I'm glad I stayed home.

Perhaps the most important thing to note for anyone who is considering whether to read or buy this book is that it is not a biography. Although the book's structure is based on the chronology of Kerouac's life, the content is more concerned with analysis than it is with a straightforward, objective account. Miles's concern is primarily to present Kerouac and his works in a more complete and sober context than the average person is likely to have gleaned from the most available cultural sources (Kerouac's own books and his image in various media); and in so doing to correct the common perception of Kerouac as pure genius hero. If the reader is looking for a traditional biography, the best one available is probably Paul Maher's 2004 "Kerouac: A Definitive Biography".

As analysis, Miles's book is perceptive and worthwhile. It is incredibly refreshing to see honest criticism of Kerouac and his ideas from a source like Barry Miles, who almost certainly drew his conclusions from a reasonably informed standpoint. Miles appears quite intent on not allowing bias, either negative of positive, to interfere with his assesment of Kerouac. He is well-researched and consistently perceptive, and his discussion of his subject is blunt, well-considered and engaging. Similarly, Miles's criticism of Kerouac's writing, though less complete than his examination of the man himself, is realistic and thoughtful. He assesses each book with a balanced eye toward its literary virtues and vices, as well as its content, and his criticism is insightful and well worth reading.

Although Miles's analysis of Kerouac's life often comes off as exceptionally uncharitable, that doesn't necessarily mean that it is inaccurate. Certainly, though, Miles is overly selective in his presentation, and often he withholds or doesn't take seriously elements of Kerouac's life which might do some little bit to salvage a more positive view of the man. In this, he goes too far, not allowing the reader to consider for himself whether Miles's interpretation is entirely correct. If this were a court case, Miles would be a prosecutor.

Nevertheless, it would be incorrect to call this book a hatchet job, as it is unlikely that "King of the Beats" is the reader's introduction to Kerouac. Rather than seeking to impugn Kerouac and destroy his reputation, Miles comes off more as dispassionately giving a severe word of caution to the reader not to get caught up in the myth of Kerouac as a compassionate and inspired genius, a holy fool, or a mystic. Ultimately, he presents a realistic perspective on a man whose legacy has often been in danger of ascending spotless to heaven. Miles's assessment of Kerouac often seems overwhelmingly negative, but this seems to come less from spite than from having a hard case to make, what with the ludicrously positive received opinion. In the end, Miles accurately presents Kerouac: naive, adolescent, passionate, confused, talented, and deeply, tragically troubled. This book is well worth reading for anyone who is making a serious study of Kerouac's life and works.