Drawing on Kerouac's close friendship and conversations with Ginsberg and Burroughs, the author offers provocative new insights into the world of the Beat Generation and its exuberant king.
Read More
Drawing on Kerouac's close friendship and conversations with Ginsberg and Burroughs, the author offers provocative new insights into the world of the Beat Generation and its exuberant king.
Read Less
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Good. Ships from UK in 48 hours or less (usually same day). Your purchase helps support Sri Lankan Children's Charity 'The Rainbow Centre'. Ex-library, so some stamps and wear, but in good overall condition. 100% money back guarantee. We are a world class secondhand bookstore based in Hertfordshire, United Kingdom and specialize in high quality textbooks across an enormous variety of subjects. We aim to provide a vast range of textbooks, rare and collectible books at a great price. Our donations to The Rainbow Centre have helped provide an education and a safe haven to hundreds of children who live in appalling conditions. We provide a 100% money back guarantee and are dedicated to providing our customers with the highest standards of service in the bookselling industry.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. This book is in good condition but will show signs of previous ownership. Please expect some creasing to the spine and/or minor damage to the cover. Aged book. Tanned pages and age spots, however, this will not interfere with reading.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very good. All orders are dispatched within 1 working day from our UK warehouse. Established in 2004, we are dedicated to recycling unwanted books on behalf of a number of UK charities who benefit from added revenue through the sale of their books plus huge savings in waste disposal. No quibble refund if not completely satisfied.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very good. Simply Brit – welcome to our online used book store, where affordability meets great quality. Dive into a world of captivating reads without breaking the bank. We take pride in offering a wide selection of used books, from classics to hidden gems, ensuring there's something for every literary palate. All orders are shipped within 24 hours and our lightning fast-delivery within 48 hours coupled with our prompt customer service ensures a smooth journey from ordering to delivery. Discover the joy of reading with us, your trusted source for affordable books that do not compromise on quality.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Good. Simply Brit – welcome to our online used book store, where affordability meets great quality. Dive into a world of captivating reads without breaking the bank. We take pride in offering a wide selection of used books, from classics to hidden gems, ensuring there's something for every literary palate. All orders are shipped within 24 hours and our lightning fast-delivery within 48 hours coupled with our prompt customer service ensures a smooth journey from ordering to delivery. Discover the joy of reading with us, your trusted source for affordable books that do not compromise on quality.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! Greener Books.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Fair in fair dust jacket. This is a used book. It may contain highlighting/underlining and/or the book may show heavier signs of wear. It may also be ex-library or without dustjacket. This is a used book. It may contain highlighting/underlining and/or the book may show heavier signs of wear. It may also be ex-library or without dustjacket.
Barry Miles' "Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats" (1999) 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 Kerouac'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 spiritual 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 tendency 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 of a writer.
