Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats: a Portrait Hb [Hardcover]

Barry Miles (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1998

A biography of the influential American "beatnik" novelist, charting both his life and legacy. Miles considers the continuing appeal of Kerouac, his iconic status, the cult of "On the Road", and the influence he has had on popular culture.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Barry Miles, noted for Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, also wrote biographies of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. This hatchet job on Kerouac lacks what makes his McCartney book great--total access to his subject--and it won't replace the more eloquent bios Kerouac and Memory Babe. But it is enriched by Miles's interviews with those in a position to debunk the legend. Was Kerouac a sweet saint, as his burgeoning congregation believes? "He cared more for his cat than for his own daughter," writes Miles, and the rich Kerouac did let his kid become a 13-year-old junkie prostitute. Was he a deep Buddhist? Buddhist poet Philip Whalen says Jack didn't quite get it. Jack couldn't drive, either--it was the idea he liked. Did he write On the Road in a burst of unedited inspiration on a 120-foot roll of paper? No, he revised the text. The last four feet of the scroll were chewed up by the dog belonging to Lucien Carr (the father of Caleb Carr, author of The Alienist), but the dog may have actually accomplished some helpful editing, as did Malcolm Cowley. The book's best line (about "the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk") was composed months later.

Kerouac was often monstrous, even before he became a KKK cross-burning kook locked in a bizarre relationship with his bigoted, alcoholic mother. For what's good about Kerouac, consult more sympathetic scholars. The best of him is in his own books. --Tim Appelo --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Making bricks without straw is a phrase that suggests a product empty of data, but Miles, biographer of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and once proprietor of a "Beat" bookshop in London, has made the process work in the case of Kerouac. Apparently unable to quote from more than a few scraps of turned to other sources to limn Kerouac's sex-obsessed, alcohol-sodden and drug-overdosed life. A striking portrait emerges of the author of On the Road (1957). Composing prolifically on teletype rolls, Kerouac produced what he thought of as spontaneous writingAbarely fictional reportage about the lives of his self-styled "Beat" (for beatific) generation. Outwardly virile, looking like a mill-town Canuck lumberjack, Kerouac was, Miles contends, "infantilised by his mother and unable to behave as an adult." Miles sees the mark of mutual Oedipal feelings in Kerouac's work and in his overheated life with his mother, to whom he always returned. Miles concedes that Kerouac's writing is "often splendid" and influential, but he dismisses most of it as self-indulgent concoctions for a market that the Beats created for themselves. A little more about this marketing would have made his book a more welcome addition to the Kerouac biography shelf, already crammed with such titles as Ann Charters's Kerouac, Gerald Nicosia's Memory Babe and Ellis Amburn's Subterranean Kerouac.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 343 pages
• Publisher: Virgin Hardbacks (September 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852276088
• ISBN-13: 978-1852276089
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,950,015 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A TARNISHED KING, October 6, 2000

By 

Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats (Hardcover)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unexpectedly compelling, January 21, 2004

By 

hugh riminton - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats (Paperback)

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.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too much judgement, February 26, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats (Paperback)

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?