Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America
by Dennis McNally
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"A blockbuster of a biography . . . absolutely magnificent."--San Francisco Chronicle Jack Kerouac--"King of the Beats," unwitting catalyst for the '60s counterculture, groundbreaking author--was a complex and compelling man: a star athlete with a literary bent; a spontaneous writer vilified by the New Critics but adored by a large, youthful readership; a devout Catholic but aspiring Buddhist; a lover of freedom plagued by crippling alcoholism. Desolate Angel follows Kerouac from his show more childhood in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, to his early years at Columbia where he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, beginning a four-way friendship that would become a sociointellectual legend. In rich detail and with sensitivity, Dennis McNally recounts Kerouac's frenetic cross-country journeys, his experiments with drugs and sexuality, his travels to Mexico and Tangier, the sudden fame that followed the publication of On the Road, the years of literary triumph, and the final near-decade of frustration and depression. Desolate Angel is a harrowing, compassionate portrait of a man and an artist set in an extraordinary social context. The metamorphosis of America from the Great Depression to the Kennedy administration is not merely the backdrop for Kerouac's life but is revealed to be an essential element of his art . . . for Kerouac was above all a witness to his exceptional times. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Poor Jack. A victim of his own success.
This is a very thourogh biography of Jack Kerouac, and it has quite a bit about the other people in the "Beat" movement, and a little bit about the events and people that shaped the times. Jack is the focus of the book, and his story, to me, is a sad one. It's just a shame that his personal demons ended up overshadowing his literary genius. I visited his grave in 2001, and mourned all of this before. And 19 years haven't changed how I feel.
Some lighthearted rememberances in here too! My favorite was this quote, as it combines my love of baseball with my love of Kerouac: Jack “... defended Ted Williams and attacked baseball’s Boudreau shift (which put virtually the entire team on one side of the show more field to stop Ted) as “unnatural,”...” I totally agree with the man, as those shifts are now so commonplace in the game. I hate the shifts!!!
“Goodbye, drunken ghost.” "Above all else, the road endures." show less
This is a very thourogh biography of Jack Kerouac, and it has quite a bit about the other people in the "Beat" movement, and a little bit about the events and people that shaped the times. Jack is the focus of the book, and his story, to me, is a sad one. It's just a shame that his personal demons ended up overshadowing his literary genius. I visited his grave in 2001, and mourned all of this before. And 19 years haven't changed how I feel.
Some lighthearted rememberances in here too! My favorite was this quote, as it combines my love of baseball with my love of Kerouac: Jack “... defended Ted Williams and attacked baseball’s Boudreau shift (which put virtually the entire team on one side of the show more field to stop Ted) as “unnatural,”...” I totally agree with the man, as those shifts are now so commonplace in the game. I hate the shifts!!!
“Goodbye, drunken ghost.” "Above all else, the road endures." show less
I loved On the Road. I also liked Visions of Cody, Big Sur, Dharma Bums, etc. With that out of the way, this book is a disturbing tale of one of the most self-destructive individuals that I have ever read. I understand and the point is made quite clearly that Kerouac was not appreciated during his time as he should have been but his life became an absolute train wreck. At the end of the book, you feel relief when he passes in that his suffering is over along with his losing battle with alcohol.
Much of the book was fascinating, though the time period covering the same as On the Road seemed to have been lifted directly from that book without much new insight.
I just upped my rating from a 3 to a 4 as the research was amazing to find out show more this material in the past of someone who severed so many ties was quite the feat. show less
Much of the book was fascinating, though the time period covering the same as On the Road seemed to have been lifted directly from that book without much new insight.
I just upped my rating from a 3 to a 4 as the research was amazing to find out show more this material in the past of someone who severed so many ties was quite the feat. show less
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5+ Works 655 Members
Common Knowledge
- People/Characters
- Jack Kerouac
- Important places
- USA
- Important events
- Beat Generation
Classifications
- Genres
- Biography & Memoir, Literature Studies and Criticism, Fiction and Literature
- DDC/MDS
- 813.54 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American fiction in English 1900-1999 1945-1999
- LCC
- PS3521 .E735 .Z775 — Language and Literature American literature American literature Individual authors 1900-1960
- BISAC
Statistics
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- 209
- Popularity
- 155,574
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.95)
- Languages
- English, Finnish, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 7
- UPCs
- 1
- ASINs
- 4
