Customer Reviews

Jack Kerouac: A Biography (Greenwood Biographies)

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Having purchased this book at deep discount, I am trying not to feel

too burned by Michael Dittman's storybook for teenagers purporting to be

a biography.

I am a long-time reader and collector of Jack Kerouac.

Previously, I have read virtually all of the Kerouac biographies,

Let me cut to the chase - this is the worst Kerouac biography ever

written. The number of factual errors in themselves is very large.

Eye-poppers such as making his girlfriend Joyce Glassman Johnson into a wife, ha! Misspelling his friend's name Lew as Lou. Point blank claiming like a National Enquirer reporter that Jack Kerouac had other children than the one daughter Jan. Funny that those alleged children never showed up for what could now have become enormous inheritances! On and on. Every few pages another error asserts itself.

The basic flaw is that the "biographer" cuts up Kerouac's personal history while over-emphasizing the chaos of his alcohol-abuse, making

the great author look like a blood-splattered, dissected frog in the end. There's no feel for the man, the spiritual seeker, the producer of one of the greatest canons of American literary and poetic work in the 20th century. Dittman did not do his homework, I suspect, in this commercial

effort to hoodwink young kids.

I am a bit of a Kerouac novice, but after finally reading "On The Road" I wanted to learn more about an author I really enjoyed. I also wanted a shorter book as an overview. This is a very good overview, but some of the lack of editing has to worry you. First, Pearl Harbor Day is wrong by four days. In one paragraph "pleases" should be "pleased", and a discussion of Denver from the "On The Road" period is mixed up to where the description isn't Denver but before Denver. The book is enlightening to me, but I am a natural sceptic when the basis stuff is wrong.

This book is a well thought out, easily readable book for college age students studying Kerouac or for the person just wanting some background on Kerouac's life and the people who surrounded him. I would highly recommend this book.