Jack Kerouac's American Journey: The Real-Life Odyssey of On the Road (Paperback)

by Paul Maher Jr. (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
This straightforward recounting of the travels that inspired On the Road attempts to fill in some of the gaps left by the already extensive chronicles of the famous beat's life. Though no period of the beat time line has been more fully documented, Maher (Kerouac: His Life and Work) tackles the details with a clear-eyed objectivity that is refreshingly focused and relatively devoid of the spin that often plagues these endeavors. Maher draws on a wide range of sources, most notably some of Kerouac's less read works such as Visions of Cody, to gain insight into little-explored aspects of the writer's personality. For example, while Kerouac's Thomas Wolfe–obsession has been exhausted by scholars and biographers, Maher delves into Kerouac's experiences with Dostoyevski and Tolstoy, and, on a related tangent, explores Kerouac's Catholicism more comprehensively than most. Maher's book also fulfills the promise of its subtitle by showing the reader how real-life events corresponded to the famous passages of On the Road, with Maher's impressive research uncovering small gems like the appearance of a cowboy in a Colorado diner. Moments like these render this work another fine tool in the growing arsenal of the true Kerouac obsessive. (Oct. 9)
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From Booklist
On the Road is built on a sturdy autobiographical framework and fueled by Kerouac's intense moral and religious questioning. In this detailed and insightful key to Kerouac's tale of Beat pilgrims on a wisdom quest, Kerouac scholar Maher precisely maps the real-life journeys that shaped the novel's odysseys, and matches each character to its real-life inspiration. On the aesthetic plain, he skillfully chronicles Kerouac's herculean efforts to channel his hard-won observations and visions into prose that emulated the work of his idols Whitman, Wolfe, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, and Charlie Parker. In the book's most memorable passages, Maher writes incisively and resonantly about Kerouac's profound attunement to "the sadness of the world." Seaman, Donna

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (November 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560259914
• ISBN-13: 978-1560259916
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #914,464 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Error-filled and Not Needed, November 10, 2007

By	Richard Masloski (New Windsor, New York USA) - See all my reviews

Does no one proof-read books anymore??? Whether the author or agent or a close friend or....Come on, Mr. Maher, anyone in-the-know who knows the skinny on the Fifties is hip to the facts that James Dean did NOT play Nick Ray in "Rebel" but that, in fact, Nick Ray directed Dean as Jim Stark in that film...and who in Creation does not know that it is Ian Fleming and NOT Alan Fleming who wrote "From Russia With Love" and was the creator of James Bond??? And Brando's "Sayonara" does NOT deal with Korea but rather with post-war Japan....and that all three flicks mentioned in the book's early-on Chapter One subheading "The 1940s" came out in the '50s: "The Wild One" "Blackboard Jungle" and "Rebel Without a Cause"...yet the misperception that these films were spawned in the mid-forties in thusly created. These are NOT trifling matters because if the author and his proof-readers and the noteworthy reviewers with their "noteworthy" blurbs on the book's back aren't catching these gaffs....then how many more riddle the pages of this book? (In one other instance Burroughs is spelled Borroughs in the same paragraph! Speed typing a la Kerouac with no revisions perhaps???) And this story - a great story of a great author's great creation and how he did it - has been covered in complete bios of Kerouac far better than here....and even the introductory essays in the recent ON THE ROAD - THE ORIGINAL SCROLL are more compelling than this tired recounting. Anyway, as Jack Webb said "Just the facts...." and the facts in this trifling book are skewered, therefore troubling. I love to read just about anything on Kerouac and his times...but the errors listed above make me wonder just how well Paul Maher Jr. knows the times of which he writes. Adios, king.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Bit of a Disappointment, December 25, 2007

By	Tom Moran (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Paul Maher Jr.'s previous book on Jack Kerouac, while hardly the "definitive" biography that its book jacket proclaimed, was still an impressive and scholarly accomplishment. It was the first biography of Kerouac I read, and while I've since read several more, Maher's book holds up pretty well.

So what the hell happened with this new book?

"Jack Kerouac's American Journey," published in time to coincide with the 50th Anniversary of the publication of "On the Road," is as sloppy as his previous book was precise. It is atrociously written and filled with poor proofreading and errors of fact. In addition, unless you're already familiar with Kerouac's life, a lot of the book isn't going to make sense since there's a lot that Maher just doesn't bother to explain. And given that many of his citations are in MLA format, one has to wonder whether or not this was an academic paper or some kind of thesis plumped up to meet a deadline and capitalize on the novel's anniversary.

Let me give just some of the errors of fact in the book (I didn't start noting them until I was more than halfway through the text):

p. 111: Kerouac never studied at the New School with "dramatist Eugene O'Neill" for the very simple reason that O'Neill never taught at the New School or anywhere else. The professor in question was O'Neill's son, the gifted and troubled classicist Eugene O'Neill Jr., who would take his own life only two years later. To be fair, Gerald Nicosia in his Kerouac biography "Memory Babe" makes the same mistake. I don't know of any Kerouac biographer who gets this right.

p. 139: Charles Chaplin was not "arrested with actress Joan Barry." He was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury. Barry was not charged with anything.

p. 155 "to resume classes at New School" Unless it's written in Russian, this is ungrammatical. It should be The New School, and the full title of the school should be used: The New School for Social Research (it's now referred to as New School University).

p. 200: "at his mother's new apartment in Richmond Hill, Long Island." This is a common mistake. Richmond Hill is not on Long Island, it's in the borough of Queens. It's like saying that someone lives in Mexico City, North America.

p. 208: "the moody broodings of Miles Davis" Unless this is a conscious nod to James Joyce's "Ulysses" (in which, on page 9 of the Random House edition, Buck Mulligan implores Stephen Dedalus to "Give up the moody brooding"), this is just bad writing.

p. 263: "The little fissure split into a widened gap." Writing doesn't get much worse than this.

p. 272: "Dean's portrayal of the troubled Nick Ray" This has been commented on by others. James Dean played Jim Stark in "Rebel Without a Cause." Nicholas Ray was the director of the film.

p. 273: This has been noted as well. Ian, not Alan, Fleming wrote the James Bond novel "From Russia With Love."

p. 277: I've always heard that Orville Prescott, not Charles Poore, was the regular book reviewer for the Times at that time, and that he was on vacation at the time of On the Road's publication, thus leaving Gilbert Milstein to write his now-infamous review.

Given all these mistakes and poor writing, there's really no reason for anyone to read this book. Try one of the many Kerouac biographies (even Maher's own) and just look at the chapters for the years 1947-1951 and you'll do a lot better than this.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars jack kerouac's american journey, January 16, 2008

By	Wayne F. Burke (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Maher traces the victories and vicissitudes of Kerouac's peripatetic life during the late l940's through 1951, charting along the way the evolution of Kerouac's aesthetic sensibility, highlighting, in particular, the contribution of Neal Cassady whose fragmented writings inspired and informed Kerouac to a greater degree than the work of other fellow travelers. Cassady's free-flowing and playful prose style was a revelation to Kerouac and moved him toward development of the theory of "spontaneous prose."
Maher concludes with the year l951 when 29 year old Kerouac wrote the "scroll version" of ON THE ROAD. The book written in three weeks, but, as noted, at least four previous versions of the book were written by Kerouac and the themes incorporated in the published work germinated for years in Kerouac's mind. "Live like a hobo and work like a dog," Kerouac advised would-be writers, and for much of his life lived by his adage. The l957 ON THE ROAD was as much draft of an older work as spontaneous composition. Kerouac had been rehearsing, you might say, for years, previous to the three week writing session.
The story of the writing of ON THE ROAD is a familiar one, told in Tim Hunt's KEROUAC'S CROOKED ROAD and elsewhere, but Maher adds to the tale through judicious use of Kerouac's journals and letters. A usage that moves readers closer to the inner workings of Kerouac's mind as he plotted his way. with dogged perseverance, to the creation of an american classic.
Though the prose is stilted and occasionally marred by awkward phrasing, Maher knows his subject and creates a compelling narrative, weaving strands of Kerouac's life and work to the greater social and cultural history of the post-WWII era.
Maher's KEROUAC, The Definitive Biography (2004) was a solid contribution to the body of Kerouac studies. The latest book is decent synthesis of a vital period in the life of a writer finally being given due recognition.
Wayne F. Burke, Montpelier, VT