Jack Kerouac's American Journey: The Real-Life Odyssey of on the Road [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

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.

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.

Having read Paul Maher's "Jack Kerouac's American Journey" and just about everything else written by and about Kerouac, I'm puzzled as to why other reviewers have chosen to nitpick a truly groundbreaking novel. Maher does not give us the same soap opera schlock about what kind of beer Jack drank or what he was watching on television just before he died. On the contrary, Maher narrows the focus to concentrate on the evolution of "On The Road" from the perspective of Jack's literary mind. We gain insights into Kerouac's fondness not just for Thomas Wolfe, but also Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mark Twain, and Joseph Conrad's dark, dream-like novel, "Heart of Darkness." Maher adds details that inspire reading far more than most of the many biographies written on Jack.

If someone is really interested in Kerouac as an artist and how the creative forces grew within him, than Maher's book is a must. If you want more half-baked stories about a man who has already been misrepresented and misunderstood, go elsewhere.