Mick Brown
New Literary Form Was Not Writing but Typing
Jack Kerouac: King of The Beats - A Portrait
By Barry Miles
Virgin 192pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
The tragedy that killed Jack Kerouac grew from a terrible misunderstanding. When Kerouac's best and most famous book, On the Road, was published in 1957, most people assumed that its protagonist, the exuberant, irresponsible, fast-talking hipster Dean Moriarty, was Kerouac himself. In fact, Moriarty was modelled on Kerouac's friend, the juvenile car thief and proto-bohemian Neal Cassady, a man, as the book has it, in whom 'every muscle twitched to live and go'.
Kerouac, an altogether more passive man, one of life's observers, just wanted to follow. Propelled into the public eye by the success of On the Road, and obliged to live out the role of 'King of the Beats', he lapsed into a crude caricature of the boozing, hedonistic free spirit,
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'A publicist interviewed by Fairrie praises Collins and her heroines ... because these were "women who behaved like men". Is that supposed to be good, given how men behaved towards Collins?'
Peter Conrad reviews a new documentary about Jackie Collins.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/easy-writer
'Walk down your supermarket pet food aisle and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single brand that claims to be made with high-welfare meat. More expensive pet food should not be about spoiling our cats but about sparing the farmed beasts we feed them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/meattoo
'Two things prevent [this book] from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/night-of-the-guillotine