Paul Maher Jr.

JAZZTIMES - December 2008

So much has already been written on Davis [ . . .] adds little to our knowledge of the man, yet all are somewhat interesting. The most worthy, Miles on Miles, gathers various magazine, newspaper, radio and TV interviews with the Prince of Darkness from late 1957 through mid-1989 and includes three posthumous remembrances from 1998 by musician-journalist Mike Zwerin, seven years after the trumpeter's death. The general tenor of this anthology is that Davis was a genius who was a combination of opposing elements: a prince and a prick, nice as well as nasty, a misogynist who attracted numerous women who he mistreated. He was distrustful of almost everyone, which led him to be the bane of interviewers.
Difficult is too mild a descriptive for him. The best and most illustrative of these relatively short works are by jazz critic s Nat Hentoff and Leonard Feather, as well as conversations with writer Eric Nisenson and radio host-musician Ben Sidran.
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POP MATTERS - November 24, 2008
Michael Patrick Brady

Public Enigma No. 1 was a nickname Miles Davis acquired somewhere along his rich and revolutionary career, a testament not only to the man’s inscrutability but to the appetites of audiences and onlookers. It was not enough to listen to the music, to hear the beautiful and breathtaking sounds that emerged from his horn. People wanted to know more about the man behind the music and delve into the deeply complex mind and personality of a genius in the hopes of better understanding how someone could create such art. Davis, however, was not very cooperative.

That’s not to say he avoided probing. In Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters with Miles Davis, editors Paul Maher Jr. and Michael K. Dorr show that Davis was willing to endure scrutiny and engage his public through the press. In the 30 interviews and profiles they have collected, spanning from the late ‘50s to the early ‘90s, Door and Maher present Miles in all his glory, as an outspoken, fiercely independent, and often acerbic individual. And yet, the more we read Davis’s own words, and the more he allows himself to express his feelings, desires, and beliefs, the more complicated (and interesting) this self-portrait becomes.

What’s fascinating about Miles on Miles is that the reader is treated to 30 separate points-of-view of the same persona, 30 sets of eyes belonging to journalists, critics, musicians, and peers, each hunting down an elusive figure that is fickle and temperamental, just as likely to frustrate with defensive retorts as he is to please with revealing answers. Davis knows what his words are worth, what his thoughts mean to those who desperately wish to know them, and so he makes his pursuers work for their treasure by erecting a confrontational demeanor. In the midst of these exchanges, he often refers to how lucky they are to be speaking to him and how their excellent final product will be—the implication being that it is because he allowed it to be so.

Miles hates the word jazz. He chafes at labels in general. He goes on at length about the trouble visited on both himself and blacks as a whole by white America, knowing that despite his fame, wealth, and accomplishment, in a country ruled by segregation and separation, he is still expected to know his place. He lauds white musicians like his collaborators Stan Getz and Bill Evans, explaining that listening to good music makes racial distinctions go out of focus, yet later implies that white musicians cannot fully grasp the nature of black music. He hates cops, after being hassled, roughed up, and arrested in New York City for escorting a white woman to a cab. In one of the book’s most amusing moments, Davis tells Newsweek, “If I could say on my record jackets that these albums can’t be sold to the police, or their relatives or friends, I would.”

More than anything though, Miles hates being comfortable. Time and time again, he revisits the concept with disdain, pointing the finger at fellow musicians who have become comfortable and whose talent and verve have eroded as a result. “There’s too much crap going on in the world that you’re supposed to be comfortable,” he tells critic Les Tompkins. “You’ve got to be on your toes. You can’t just stand—because they’re fighting somewhere, man, and it’s pretty messy.”

He also loves making other people uncomfortable. When dining with John Palcewski of Cavalier magazine at a restaurant in Boston in 1969, Davis terrorizes the staff, putting on a show for the writer. “This place looks like a whorehouse,” he announces, before needling the waiter about the quality of his soup. “It tastes like you look.” This aversion to comfort and desire for tension can be clearly seen in the evolution of his work from his landmark ‘Birth of the Cool’ recordings to his controversial fusion work in the latter stages of his career. Davis never wanted to stop moving, always wanted to be doing something, pissing somebody off, and driving people wild.

Whether or not the craggy, flashy persona Davis provided his profilers is the real Miles Davis is in doubt. Many of the writers confess that on background, many of those closest to the man say he’s not the flamethrower he appears to be. At the end of a particularly volatile interview in 1972, in which Davis calls family “a lot of bullshit” and seems to say he wouldn’t go out of his way to help his children were they in need, writer Leonard Feather includes a short discussion with Dizzy Gillespie who calls Davis “bashful.” Davis’s daughter Cheryl agrees, calling her father shy. This contradiction between the brash, public Davis and the timid, private Davis recurs throughout Miles on Miles.

The truth seems to be that the Miles Davis encountered off-stage was the real show, the real performance, and that on stage was when Miles was at his most serene and true. As writer Stephen Davis says, Miles “was said to be a violent and malevolent son of a bitch with a cinder for a heart and a cash register for a mind. All one had to do was listen to him play his horn to know that wasn’t true”.

Miles on Miles is an examination of Davis’s lifelong campaign to define himself publicly and obscure himself privately, erecting a grand façade of a terrifying, egotistical, artistic giant to shield the quieter, more approachable man within. It’s a strategy that seems to have backfired; the character Miles created around himself is brutally compelling, and watching him spar with this diverse set of insightful and thoughtful writers is a delight. At the collection’s close, Miles’ enigma remains firmly in tact, and thankfully so. A little mystery always keeps things interesting.
7/10



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ST. LOUIS JAZZ NOTES:

Tuesday, October 28, 2008
New book collects Miles Davis interviews
Legendary trumpeter and St. Louis area native Miles Davis is one of the most talked-about and written-about musicians of the late 20th century, and he's now the subject of yet another book, Miles on Miles, which collects 30 interviews from various periods of Davis' storied career.

The blurb from publishers Lawrence Hill Books describes the volume as "essential reading for anyone who wants to know what Miles Davis thought about his music, life, and philosophy. Miles on Miles reveals the jazz icon as a complex and contradictory man, secretive at times but extraordinarily revealing at others. Miles was not only a musical genius, but an enigma, and nowhere else was he so compelling, exasperating, and entertaining as in his interviews, which vary from polite to outrageous, from straight-ahead to contrarian. Even his autobiography lacks the immediacy of the dialogues collected here. Many were conducted by leading journalists like Leonard Feather, Stephen Davis, Ben Sidran, Mike Zwerin, and Nat Hentoff. Others have never before seen print, are newly transcribed from radio and television shows, or appeared in long-forgotten magazines."

Edited by Paul Maher Jr. and Michael K. Dorr, the hardcover tome has 320 pages and a list price of $24.95. Lawrence Hill Books is a division of Chicago Review Press that "specializes in mostly nonfiction on topics of African American and Latino interest, progressive politics, civil and human rights, and feminism." (For what it's worth, they've also published a book on Davis' longtime arranger and collaborator Gil Evans that looks interesting...)

LIBRARY JOURNAL - November 2008:

"Miles Davis is often thought of as a mystery man or a prince-of-darkness type. His prickly personality intimidated many, and his sometimes-lurid lifestyle led some to view him as above the average mortal. Yet as Maher (Jack Kerouac's American Journey) and poet and playwright Dorr show with this collection of interviews conducted over an extended period of time, Davis was consistent in his desire to give passionate music to his audiences and to help younger musicians develop into great musicians. He also liked to put people on. But from 1957 up to nearly the year he died (1991), many journalists and authors were able to delve deeper and discover a much more nuanced and brilliant musician behind Davis's public facade. Maher and Dorr bring together 28 interviews, some transcribed for the first time, which taken together give a fine portrait of Davis , demystifying him to a large extent. While many of these interviews can be found in a variety of publications, it's pleasurable to have them in this one handy and thoughtfully edited volume." -William G. Kenz, Minnesota State Univ. Lib., Moorhead


VANITY FAIR November 2008:

"In *Miles on Miles* (Lawrence Hill), Paul Maher Jr. and Michael K Dorr score supercool interviews with the visionary jazzman, dubbed 'the Price of Darkness.'"


AMERICAN SONGWRITER September 2008:
5/5 Stars
http://wp.as.remarkablewit.com/2008/09/miles-on-miles-interviews-and-encounters-with-miles-davis-edited-by-paul-maher-jr-and-michael-k-dorr/

"As an interviewee, Miles Davis has often been regarded as, at best, aloof and uninterested, and, at worst, cantankerous and uncooperative. But as this collection of interviews with the “Prince of Silence” reveals, it’s more accurate to say that he was simply a man who didn’t suffer fools gladly. Of course, it’s fun to see him shoot down interviewers with a well-timed observation, as when he chides one for “talking nonsense.” But despite his protestation that “if you understood everything I said, you’d be me,” the interviews are nonetheless revealing. Spanning a range of over 30 years (1957 to 1989, along with a few pieces published after his death), Davis is blunt and sometimes shocking in his pronouncements (a recurring theme is his insistence that the word “jazz” is “a nigger word…it means ‘nigger’”), but always willing to meet a sincere question with a thoughtful answer (and his views on race are at least as interesting as his views on music). And though some pieces are drawn from mainstream outlets like Newsweek, there are a number of rare acquisitions from radio station interviews and long-defunct magazines."

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 9/8/08:
"Davis was regarded by many as, in the words of one journalist, “the wickedest, canniest, deepest, slickest, baddest musician” of the last century, and Maher (Kerouac: His Life and Work) and Dorr, a poet and literary agent, have put together a collection of interviews covering the full spectrum of his career, from publicity materials linked to one of his earliest recordings for Columbia Records in the 1950s to a conversation two years before his death. Davis wasn't always the easiest person to talk to—“if you're going to shut up, man, I'll tell you” was his impatient response in one frustrating conversation—but when approached by the right person, someone with the perceptiveness of Nat Hentoff or Art Taylor, he could produce dazzling insights (in one 1987 interview, he spins intricate technical details on getting the right sound out of synthesizers). It's the little scenes that are most memorable: Davis at a birthday party for Louis Armstrong, or trying to persuade his “errand boy” biographer Eric Nisenson to make a late-night drug delivery. In some unfortunate cases, the interview is more about the self-important journalist celebrating his proximity to a jazz legend than about Davis himself, but even then it's impossible for anybody but Davis to hold the spotlight for long." (Nov.)
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Review: Jack Kerouac's American Journey
Paul Maher Jr.'s Study of The Real Life Odyssey of On The Road © Dale Van Every (Oct 19, 2008)
http://artistbiographies.suite101.com/article.cfm/review_jack_kerouacs_american_journey

Paul Maher Jr.'s 2007 book Jack Kerouac's American Journey (The Real-Life Odyssey of On The Road) is as much a biography about the famous novel as it is about the Beat Generation author himself. Published in 1957, On The Road has remained a consistent resident on "greatest american novels" lists since. Along with Alan Ginsberg's poem Howl, the tale of youthful pilgrimage is considered the defining work of the 1950's Beat Movement.
Biography Coincides With 50th Anniversary Of "On The Road"

The publication of Jack Kerouac's American Journey coincided with the 50th anniversary of On The Road's release, an occasion that also included, among others, publication of the legendary "original scroll". The well-known story of Kerouac's manic three-week stream-of-consciousness composition on a single 120 foot roll of taped-together art sheets is one of the things this book adresses and seeks to understand.

Both Jack Kerouac and On The Road are among the most written-about literary entities in 20th century American culture. The author's task --to bring fresh details and perspective to what led up to and went into the composition of the famous novel-- was no small one.

Paul Maher Jr. is a Kerouac scholar with two other books about the Beat king to his credit. He brings his foreknowledge, as well as unprecedented access to both Kerouac and Ginsberg's journals, and the correspondence between Kerouac and Neal Cassady to the writing of his book, and it shows.
Biography Delves Into Characterizations, Literary Influences

Ginsberg and Cassady figure prominently in On The Road as the fictional cohorts Carlo Marx and Dean Moriarity (respectively) to Kerouac's alter-ego Sal Paradise. One of the strengths of Jack Kerouac's American Dream is how much new information Maher Jr. reveals about these real-life characters (and several others to a lesser degree) particularly in relation to their interaction with Kerouac and hence the impact they had on the novel.

Beyond the characterizations, Maher Jr. takes a close look at nearly everything that did (and could have) influenced Jack Kerouac's writing of On The Road. The novel was actually written in 1951, nearly six years before its publication, so the book begins several years before that date, on the eve of Kerouac's first momentous road trip into the American west. The real events of this and other trips are revealed through Kerouac's journals, and it's interesting to see how they were transformed in to fiction.

Among the other intriguing revelations in Jack Kerouac's American Dream are Kerouac's thoughts on his literary influences (including Balzac, Wolfe, Dostoyevsky and Whitman) and his own constantly forming and evolving theories on writing and life.

"It's the mere presence of life, not its drama, that drives me wondering and ecstatic to write about it---" Kerouac claims in his journal, " but how shall I write about it as no other man has written about it, unless I accept the initiative of complete and slightly 'insane', originality, and do so in good earnest faith?"

For more than half a century, readers have known that this is exactly what Jack Kerouac ultimately did. Paul Maher Jr.'s Jack Kerouac's American Dream shows us how and why.

Maher Jr., Paul. Jack Kerouac's American Dream, 2007, Thunder's Mouth Press / 295 pgs.

(ISBN#: 13: 978-1-56025-991-6)

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The Yummy List (http://yummylist.hollygleason.net/?p=19)

Jack Kerouac’s American Journey Paul Maher, Jr

On The Road may be the most iconic work of beat/restless/rootless prose poetry ever published — and Jack Kerouac’s soul masterpiece came as much from the shards of a life consumed completely as anything. Here scholar Paul Maher, Jr. explores the names, places, moments that shaped the man, the time, the experiences that cast this American classic in a whole new kind of literature.

With the eternally overturning diaspora of youth — each generation’s wave of disaffectation crashing upon the generation before’s — On The Road remains a constant. To be inspired, to be electrified in your will to tumble and roam, it is The Bible, and Jack Kerouac’s American Journey is the work that shows where and how it came to be, as well as offering a thrilling look at the other highly eletric voices of the time: Allen Ginsburg, William S Boroughs and beyond. For those who remember how it feels and those just coming into their own impossibly moorless yearnings.

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JACK KEROUAC'S AMERICAN JOURNEY, The Real-Life Odyssey of "ON THE ROAD," by Paul Maher Jr., Thunder Mouth's Press, New York NY, 2007.


PAUL MAHER JR.'S book JACK KEROUAC'S AMERICAN JOURNEY traces the victories and vicissitudes of Kerouac's peripatetic life during the late 1940's through 1951. Maher charts, along the way, the evolution of Kerouac's aesthetic sensibility, highlighting, in particular, the contribution of Neal Cassady whose letters and fragmented writings inspired and informed Kerouac to a greater degree than the work of fellow travelers Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Cassady's free-flowing and playful prose style was a revelation to Kerouac and moved him toward developing a theory of "spontaneous prose."
Maher's book concludes with the year 1951, the year Kerouac, twenty-nine-years-old, wrote the "scroll version" of ON THE ROAD (published in 1957). The book was written in three weeks, but, as Maher notes, 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 short life lived by his adage. The 1957 version 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, previously told in Tim Hunt's KEROUAC'S CROOKED ROAD, and elsewhere, but Maher adds to the tale through judicious use of Kerouac's journals, letters, and fiction. A usage that moves readers ever 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 Maher's prose is somewhat stilted and occasionally marred by awkward phrasing--such as "...his mother had supported him continuously since her husband's death up to then." And "...Cassady drove with a grimace and LuAnne slept." (Who's "grimace"?)--Maher knows his subject and creates a compelling narrative, neatly weaving strands of Kerouac's life and work to the greater social and cultural history of the post-WW II era.
In 2004 Maher published KEROUAC, The Definitive Biography. Though hardly "definitive" the work is a solid contribution to the body of Kerouac biographical studies. Maher's latest is a good synthesis of a vital period in the life of a writer whose greatness is finally being given due recognition. - Wayne F. Burke
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from www.schvoong.com (March 14, 2008)
by Catherine Gallagher

This book is a biography, not only of the author during the period of his life leading up to his writing and publishing of ON THE ROAD, but also of the book itself. From the beginning of Kerouac''s travels (intellectually, and later, physically and emotionally) to the end of his process, this book chronicles his artistic struggles, his emotinal growth and transformation, and his spiritual odyssey, as well as that of several of his friends, including Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. It describes these struggles and the incidents that are their symptoms and/or genesis, in an unemotional and fairly nonjudgmental way. This book is as much a chronicle in time of America''s cultural experience in the postwar "beat" period, as it is a biographical sketch of one of America''s greatest authors.

This is a very encouraging and inspiring book to read if you are an aspiring writer. From chaos and inchoate sensitivity, writer''s block to penniless (and typerwriterless) wandering of the streets and byways of America, his obstacles are enormous; yet in the end he creatd some of the greatest experiences of the human soul and life arising in mid-twentieth century America.
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from Midwest Book Review (April 3, 2008

An essential acquisition for high school to public libraries featuring Kerouac's works.

JACK KEROUAC'S AMERICAN JOURNEY: THE REAL-LIFE ODYSSEY OF 'ON THE ROAD' is a 'must' for any library including Kerouac's fiction. It celebrates the 50th anniversary of ON THE ROAD and provides a biography of the book and its popularity, considering Kerouac's objectives, style, and influence and following his travels throughout the U.S. between 1947 and 1951. In providing a survey of the real people and experiences which helped shape ON THE ROAD, this offers many important keys to understanding and will prove an essential acquisition for high school to public libraries featuring Kerouac's works.

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from Bookviews.com (March 2008)

Alan Caruba, March 2008

Stories About Real People

It well may be that all story-telling began as tales told around the fire about a lost family member or one’s own hunting exploits. In time they would become myths. Today they are memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies.

More than fifty years have passed since Jack Kerouac transformed American literature with his book, On the Road. It became the bible of the Beat Generation. That was 50 years ago and I can remember when it was first published. Paul Maher, Jr. has written Jack Kerouac’s American Journey: The Real-Life Odyssey of On the Road ($16.00, Da Capo Press, member of the Perseus Group, softcover). It is an uncompromising look at the real people, adventures, and experiences that were reflected in what is now regarded as a 20th century classic. Maher has performed an excellent piece of research via interviews, access to letters, notebooks, and correspondence. The physical and metaphysical journey is revealed. It is quite revealing and a reminder that iconic authors are often frail, flawed creatures when detached from their writings.

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from Tuscon Citizen (February 28, 2008)

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

By Paul Maher Jr. (Thunder's Mouth Press, $16)

Between 1947 and 1951, Jack Kerouac traveled throughout the United States in search of "the true America " that he hoped to document in a new book. His book "On the Road" was published in 1957. This formless, spontaneous work became an instant classic and established the author as a spokesman for the "Beat Generation," which he was the first to name. Maher, author of "Kerouac: His Life and Work," has written an insider's look at the real people, adventures, and experiences that contributed to one of the intriguing literary works ever written in America."

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from The Improper Bostonian (January 23-February 5, 2008)

"Beloved Beatnik"

Jack Kerouac's life and pen echoed the music from that period in the late 1940s when the improvisational strains of jazz inspired a crazy looseness of being. Along with his hipster, beatnik crew--Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and the dangerous, charismatic Neal Cassady--Kerouac careened around the country. They drank, hallucinated, lived sordidly on the muddy edge and, amid illegal acts and wild sex, recklessly married and tossed aside women. (Burroughs actually killed his wife.) But in Jack Kerouac's American Journey, Paul Maher Jr. conveys how the title character, though Kero-wacked, somehow managed to distill the self-absorbed mess into something undeniably lyrical and mythic in his writing. He wanted to convey "the indescribable sad music of the night in America." An allegorical Hooded Wayfarer with a "green glassy visage" seemed to haunt Kerouac, and dreams and visions, along with echoes of the percussive themes of Whitman, Thomas Wolfe, and Dostoevsky's characters, influenced his literary thumbprint. His consciousness streamed out on a 120-foot scroll to become On the Road. Maher, frighteningly, often beautifully, brings this gifted madman to life.

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from BOSTON GLOBE - December 20, 2007

Jack Kerouac has become one of those larger than life characters from American literature. Like Ernest Hemingway and Walt Whitman before him, Kerouac's mythic status as a road-weary traveler and writer of spontaneous, explosive prose is the reason readers are still drawn to his work.

Of course, the real Jack Kerouac was quite the opposite. Although he truly believed in an America that's only discovered on society's fringes, and tried to express this by writing in a prose style that mimicked jazz music's improvisational techniques, he was still a self-conscious writer who worried about what people thought of him and who methodically mapped out every word he wrote, constantly self-editing and re-writing as he went along. While Kerouac's fans thought of him as an independent man who was just out for kicks, Kerouac's reality was that he longed to settle down, own a ranch in Colorado, and marry a perfectly submissive and quiet wife who would bake and clean for him. At the same time, Kerouac was trying to come to terms with his Catholic past and his changing spiritual views that eventually led him to Buddhism (and, later, back to Christianity).

In Jack Kerouac's American Journey, Paul Maher, Jr. shows how a young man with grand ideas tries to seek out meaning in an America that became increasingly meaningless to him. Along the way, Kerouac decides that he must write the perfect modern American picaresque that would rival anything his heroes Mark Twain and Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; in On The Road, Kerouac takes his adventures and desires to new territories and American experiences and creates the perfect novel to express the yearning Americans felt at the time.

Maher's well-researched book about Jack Kerouac's journey as he wrote and published On The Road begins with a young Kerouac attending classes at Columbia University, when he meets his lifelong friends and literary confidantes Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. At the time, Kerouac was obsessed with writers like Thomas Wolfe and Fyodor Dostoevsky who inspired him to keep writing. Kerouac sees in these writers and friends that life is lived best on the fringes of society, or, as Sal Paradise puts it in On The Road, life is lived best with "the mad ones ... desirous of everything at the same time."

Maher's research of this first trip shows that Kerouac's re-telling of it in On The Road is almost exactly as it happened, but it took Kerouac a while to finally decide to make it out on the road. As Cassady and Ginsberg moved out to Denver, Colorado, Kerouac finally got the nerve to get up out of his mother's home (where he had spent several months typing out his first novel The Town and The City) and travel by bus to Denver. Maher dives into Kerouac's personal journals and letters to Cassady and Ginsberg (plus interviews with the girls he met along the way) to reveal a lost man trying to find some meaning in what seems completely meaningless. Through his many other trips across America and into Mexico, Kerouac realizes the hope and dreams of the America he tries to re-create, and as a result, Kerouac is able to find his way along the road to self-fulfillment.

Jack Kerouac's American Journey also takes us into Kerouac's process of writing, and reveals a man who was a careful recorder of his life. Maher explains that the crazy spontaneity of Kerouac's life is more of a front than anything else. The Kerouac who sat in the bedroom of his mother's house typing away was not nearly as improvisational as we may think. After late evenings typing away, he would write ideas and criticism of his favorite writers in his notebook, and he'd also write an exact number of words he had typed up that day. Sometimes, the number would be near 3,000. Other times, 800 or so. But he was careful to write down the number, especially in the early days while working on The Town and the City.

Of course, Kerouac's life was more than just the subterranean life of a hobo on the road. By the time Kerouac sits down to re-write On The Road from scratch, he is married to Joan Anderson and trying to settle down. He also "took eight sheets of drawing paper and Scotch-taped them together, end to end, creating one continuous roll that he could feed into his typewriter," a typing technique that he used to create the scroll version of On The Road and establish the myth that he was a spontaneous writer who never self-edited (he would allow this myth to carry on until his death). Maher, of course, demythologizes this myth and carefully puts Kerouac among other literary giants of the 20th Century, such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, showing that Kerouac spent years and meticulous planning in order to create his great American novel.

Kerouac's world, of course, was ever changing. Maher shows how the changes in post-World War II America affected Kerouac and his fellow "beat" writers, and how Americans slowly move to the suburbs and into lives of domesticity. At the same time, Maher is quick to show that Kerouac was heavily offended by this new found domestic world, and America's increasing desire for conformity and restraint deeply affected how he shaped his novel. By 1957, the year On The Road was finally published, America was a much different place. Rock and Roll had taken over, the civil rights movement was finally taking hold, and Americans didn't know it at the time, but they were about to elect their first Catholic president in the 1960 presidential elections. Although Kerouac had wanted the novel published earlier and had moved on from its themes by 1957, he was happy to see his American picaresque find a place in the youth of the time.

Jack Kerouac's American Journey is a carefully recorded book about one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century, and unlike many other Kerouac scholars, Maher doesn't fall into the traps of myth and legend. Instead, Maher shows the real-life struggles Kerouac faced to create On The Road, and as a result, Maher reveals the profound influence the novel would have on America's changing and maturing attitudes through the 1960s and beyond. Today, Kerouac's novel still influences new generations of readers to live out their own personal fantasies of the American dream, whether those fantasies are in their home, on the page, or out on the road discovering the mad corners of America.
(originally posted at BlogCritics Magazine, 12/20/07)
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from LIBRARY JOURNAL - September 15, 2007

Maher, Paul Jr. Jack Kerouac’s American Journey: The Real-Life Odyssey of On the Road. Thunder’s Mouth: Avalon, dist. by Publishers Group West. Oct. 2007. c.320p. bibliog. ISBN 978-1-56025-991-6. pap. $15.99. LIT

Jack Kerouac was a self-centered alcoholic with an inability to commit and a seeming desire to fail. He was also a literary phenomenon who created a prose style based on bebop jazz, gave voice to the alienation created by industrial consumer society, and offered hope to those hungry for an alternative life based on awareness and art. Concurrent with the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road, Maher (Kerouac: The Definitive Biography) uses journals and letters, plus four fictional works by Kerouac, to show how his personal philosophy, lifestyle, real-life experiences, literary influences, and social context shaped his literary work from 1947 to 1951. Maher also strips bare Kerouac’s romanticized fictional image of Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty in On the Road) and exposes him as the criminal con artist he was. Maher is no apologist for Kerouac’s own character flaws; instead, he examines them objectively to depict circumstances that led to a body of literature that has influenced three generations. This book best serves those who have some familiarity with Kerouac and are interested in learning how his experiences influenced his work. Recommended for academic and public collections.—Jerry Shuttle, East Tennessee State Univ. Lib., Johnson City



from Christian Science Monitor - September 2, 2007

"Of interest to those deeply into Kerouac is Jack Kerouac's American Journey: The Real-Life Odyssey of On the Road by Paul Maher Jr., which retraces Kerouac's steps and delves deeper into Kerouac's other writing and influences, offering some noteworthy new insights in the process."


from Washington Post BookWorld - August 31, 2007

“A biographical study of the Road years…A helpful, well-researched…companion to the novels, with special emphasis on the actual trips and their transformation into fiction.”— Washington Post Book World

from BOOKLIST - August 2007

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

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.”
— Donna Seaman

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from PUBLISHERS WEEKLY - JULY 16, 2007

Jack Kerouac's American Journey: The Real-Life Odyssey of On the Road
Paul Maher Jr.. Thunder's Mouth, $15.99 paper (320p) ISBN 978-1-56025-991-6

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 researched, 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 KIRKUS REVIEWS - JULY 15, 2007
JACK KEROUAC’S AMERICAN JOURNEY: The Real-Life Odyssey of On The Road

On the Road, celebrating its 50th birthday, may have been composed in a white heat. But, as Kerouac scholar Maher ably shows in this biography of the book and its author, it took years for that heat to build.

Kerouac’s famed friendship with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs dates to the mid-1940s; later in the decade he learned the word “beat” from Burroughs, who, Maher notes, learned it from writer Herbert Huncke, whom Kerouac called “the greatest storyteller I’ve ever known.” Huncke used the word as a synonym for “poor,” but Kerouac exalted, characteristically, “like sleeping in the subways, like Huncke used to do, and yet being illuminated and having illuminated ideas about apocalypse and all that.” Kerouac’s borrowing would make him, famously, the spokesman for the so-called Beat Generation a decade later, after On the Road was published in 1957. Kerouac’s epochal book, too, Maher chronicles, took shape in the late 1940s, when depressive Kerouac (“the experience of life is a regular series of deflections that finally results in a circle of despair”) and madcap generational bad influence Neal Cassady tore around the country on a few epic amphetamine- and beer-fueled car trips, visiting such places as Oakland, with its “most interesting skid row in America,” and Denver, where poor hive-beset polyamorous Cassady kept multiple households. The movement was constant, Cassady covering, as Maher carefully records, “4,943 miles across the country” in a single week and Kerouac’s logging more than 8,000 miles by thumb, rail and other suitably apocalyptic hobo contrivances. Publisher Robert Giroux began to court Kerouac as a prospective author in the late 1940s and publish him in 1950 as well, but, as Maher writes, “the next seven years would test [Kerouac’s] endurance as a writer harshly,” finally yielding his breakthrough book.

Smart and fast-paced; one of the better pieces to appear so far in this anniversary year.

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from BEAT SCENE 53 . . . KEROUAC: HIS LIFE AND WORK

“Originally published in the USA in 2004, and now in this rather large and obviously lovingly researched softcover, Paul Maher has added to the pile of Kerouac biographies. Revised and updated already it will add fuel to the fire and the debate as to the true nature, personality and writing capabilities of a man who was ignored for seven years by publishers, then feted as a celebrity through a few short years in the late 1950s, then effectively exiled in his own land until his death in 1969. There followed barren years of obscurity until he was revived, I suspect largely by a loyal band of readers who challenged the publishing world to reissue his out of print works. Fanciful? Many of Kerouac’s books were very difficult to get hold of in the 1970s, biographies were scarce. A film, HEARTBEAT, set his restoration back years. You can’t help but admire the avalanche of information and evidence Maher has ammassed here. Just dive in and discover.”


from BOOKFORUM - FEBRUARY/MARCH 2007

"When did what writers say in interviews become at least as important as what they actually write? . . . The author interview, which has truly come into its own in the last century, might be best thought of as a literary genre with its tone, rhythm, and themes all as intentionally crafted as a poem's or essay's. . . . The recent publication of EMPTY PHANTOMS: Interviews & Encounters with Jack Kerouac, a hefty volume edited by PAUL MAHER, JR., offers an opportunity not only to reflect on whether the author interview constitutes an actual genre of literary performance but also to experience immersion in a single writer's oral tradition. . . . Interviewers, who had previously been mere ink-stained wretches, were now often well-known authors or journalists. Kerouac was quizzed by BEN HECHT, MIKE WALLACE, STEVE ALLEN, WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR., and DAN WAKEFIELD. . . . More like peer-to-peer encounters, these interviews tend to come off as real conversations rather than as staged performances. . . . To be sure, Big Questions were still lobbed at Jack Kerouac. Repeatedly called upon to answer for an entire generation's cultural predilections, he proved to be an awkward if endearing spokesman for the Beat movement. He managed to sound cryptic and naïve at once, avoiding direct responses and sounding embarrassing notes of sincerity." ----ALBERT MOBILIO

full article here: http://www.bookforum.com/mobilio.html

from AMERICAN LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP (2004)

"A substantial addition to Jack Kerouac scholarship is
Paul Maher Jr.'s Kerouac: The Definitive Biography
(Taylor Trade), the first Kerouac biography to be
based on primary sources."
Catherine Calloway - Duke University Press


Toronto Star
January 8, 2005
LITERARY AFFAIRS

"That Jack Kerouac was always a naïf
Of so many bios, the best book yet - Proof he was better looking, and a better writer, than the pack that chased him"
Jan. 8, 2006. 01:00 AM
JIM CHRISTY

There is just something about Jack Kerouac that inspires and has always inspired hatred or love. Nowhere is this more apparent than in articles about him and interviews with him. Paul Maher Jr. has assembled pieces ranging over 50 years, and his book Empty Phantoms is a revelation, even for those who think they are familiar with the biographical material.
Kerouac always had a problem with interviewers, at least until his last years, when he no longer gave a flying you-know-what. In the early days he knew journalists were out to crucify him — all the Hemingway-influenced reporters who wanted to bang the hobohemian's head against the wall and the would-be but never-were-going-be-great writers who resented his early success and notoriety.
He bore up under these interrogations, trying to answer their inane questions — "Do you support rock and roll delinquency?" — while trying to be true to himself.
Imagine giving this answer to Mike Wallace in 1958: "Sure I took dope. Lots of it. It was blissful because I didn't have to worry about myself anymore."
Maher, a very astute commentator, makes the central point about Kerouac as a subject for journalism, namely that he "committed the social faux pas of simply being too honest."
Whether talking to representatives of the Detroit News or The Paris Review, to Allen Ginsberg, Steve Allen or Ben Hecht, to himself in private or William Buckley Jr. on television, Kerouac was always a naïf and it got him into a whole lot of trouble.
Some of the early material is difficult to read for the sheer meanness of the comments. There was one writer called Dan Wakefield who made dissing Kerouac an avocation. Two articles published here survive the decades as horrible examples of hideous envy. James Weschler is another nitwit who condescended to Kerouac, time and again, titling one article about him "The Age of Unthink."
It must have disturbed these people down to where their souls should have been to hear this man who was notorious, handsome and a better writer than they would have dared hope to be, talking sincerely about Buddha and Jesus.
Eventually Kerouac began to retreat from opportunities, afraid of making a fool of himself, afraid of being made a fool. (Michelangelo Antonioni wanted him to play Jesus in a movie. Benny Goodman wanted him for a gig.) It didn't help.
He was spoofed on The Jack Paar Show as Jack Crackjack, belittled by John Updike in The New Yorker and even put down by Dorothy Parker in Esquire — in the same issue that Kerouac had a contribution. It never ended and is still going on. The late Charles Bukowski, who didn't come close to him either as a writer or a drinker, said that Kerouac was a guy "who couldn't write but looked like a rodeo cowboy."
The New York Post sent reporter Al Aronowitz to Long Island to interview Kerouac at his home. Aronowitz's editors actually told their man his assignment was to do a hatchet job. Aronowitz wound up producing the first and just about the only unprejudiced piece about Kerouac to appear in the man's lifetime. The Post refused to run it.
Kerouac couldn't escape his image, and fared no better in the '60s. A clip of him on William Buckley's Firing Line television show has been used in several documentaries. Kerouac has been derided mainly because of his appearance. He was no longer the rodeo cowboy; more like a typical lumberjack you might run into in Trois-Rivières (where his ancestors came from). The full transcript of that show is reproduced by Maher and now it is obvious why he wasn't taking much part in the proceedings. It was an hour's worth of inanities, saved only by Kerouac's refusal to take the travesty seriously. Once he interrupted Buckley to address Ed Sanders of the Fugs, telling him that he'd been arrested a few days earlier for what the policeman said was "decay."
A decayed Kerouac was, however, more interesting than his peers, as witness his 1968 interview in The Paris Review with Ted Berrigan. The interview was conducted a year before Kerouac's death and it was done sober. In a piece that follows the interview, Berrigan declares that editor George Plimpton was too nervous to allow the thing to be published in full and also inserted, throughout the piece, the comment "(drinks were served.)" They weren't.
So Kerouac couldn't escape. Not even in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he hid out and where he died. Perhaps the best piece in the book is John Clellon Holmes's essay about Kerouac's life and death, and his funeral, "Gone in October" — one of the best examples of elegiac prose in the language. It's worth, as the saying goes, the price of the book.
There have been more books published about Jack Kerouac in the past 30 or so years than about any other American writer. Yet he has not been well served by biographers. Empty Phantoms is the best thing yet produced. It's as if Maher allows us to see Kerouac in the midst of a long battle, during which he never fights back, yet each sling and arrow helps reveal his peculiar genius.
Other Kerouac books are invariably depressing because they nail their subject in his coffin with a potbelly, a pasty face and a dumb bow tie. This one lets him roam around free where, as he told one interviewer he wished he was, "safe in heaven dead."

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
July 29, 2005
"In Brief"

A biography that calls itself "definitive" is asking for trouble. In Jack Kerouac's case, however, a valid biography of a writer whose way of living is perhaps better known than his writings does indeed need to seperate itself from the rest of the field. Ann Charters, Kerouac's first biographer, was denied access to archival material, having to rely instead on Kerouac's fictionalized reminiscences, and on the recollections, fallible and undoubtedly biased, of those she interviewed. Paul Maher Jr. points out that "subsequent biographers have chosen to rely heavily on Charter's book to confirm facts and seek a balanced perspective," and goes on to claim that he was worked "meticulously and conscientiously" from primary sources to produce a "fresh and more accurate account of Kerouac."
Opening with the first record of Kerouac's ancestors in 1720, this thoroughly researched and worthy biography does not really come to the point until well past page 60, where we find Kerouac, aged eighteen, planning to become a playwright. In a reflective piece, "A Play I Want To Write," he described what was to become his literary method: "This play of mine will have to be a spontaneous burst of passion which I will develop all of a sudden, then I shall rush to my typewriter." From then on Kerouac is an engaging mix of anecdote and archive. Tales of ecstacy and despair, of drugs and drunkenness and poetry, are counterbalanced by Maher's perceptive commentary and criticism.
Kerouac himself comes over as a confused romantic perpetually in danger of self-destruction, a man driven by twin demons of wanderlust. To Neal Cassady he complains of his own family's consumerism, and of how they sit "worrying about money and work and insurance and security and all that, in their white tiled kitchen." Meanwhile, in the same letter, he recalls an episode from his recent wanderings with Cassady, when they saw railroad men "with their lunchpails in the night in Baltimore and Carolina and Texas & Bakersfield. We dug them as old workmen, we understood something about them." Romantic and confused, yes-and not a little patronizing.


Irish Times 9th July 2005
On the road to immortality
Gerald Dawe


Biography: This is a story of two photographs. The cover of Paul Maher's methodical biography shows Jack Kerouac, the All-American star footballer, one-time marine and merchant seaman, of brash good looks, slicked back hair, the Windsor knotted tie loosened around the poplin-shirted neck, staring the camera down; over his left shoulder, like a film noir moon, the light blurs in what might be a hotel room.

Kerouac takes up the full picture, confident, self-propelling, no messing.

The second photograph, taken the year before his death in 1969 at age 47, reveals a totally different figure, slumped in a chair, bloated with drink, the shadow of good looks blunted by the sunken body language, his arm around his friend, John Sampas. A life that burned brightly had all but burned out.

Author of one of the great post-second World War novels, On the Road (1957), Kerouac pioneered a form of "spontaneous prose" (which it wasn't) and trans-genre writing (which it was) - an ebullient, lyrical, physical mix of autobiography as fiction. He was the centre of a group of writers in the US who fought for personal and artistic freedom in the aftermath of the second World War and the conformist Fifties. The "Beats", as they were to be known worldwide, consisted of lost souls - dangerous, broken and damaged in many ways, among them criminals, junkies and "high-class" girls, looking for thrills. They all shared a restlessness and curiosity about the American continent and spent most of their lives trying to find out what America "was"; not the American dream so much as the American dawn. Their lives make Sex and the City look like a ride in the park.

Both Allen Ginsberg, who Kerouac met in New York, and Neal Cassady were, like Kerouac, from immigrant backgrounds; William Seward Burroughs, another key figure, was, however, a Harvard graduate, grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine, and lived off $200 a month (a tidy sum) provided by his wealthy and long-suffering parents.

The vulnerabilities of Kerouac's upbringing in a French-speaking Canadian family - the loss of his brother, Gerard, at a young age; the early death of his father; and the unhealthy obsessions of his mother with whom he was to live for the best part of his life - were matched in Cassady's shattered childhood of sleeping in dosshouses with his alcoholic father. Ginsberg saw his own mother crack at a relatively early age and live her last years in a state hospital.

The heady ether that drew these men together - drugs, booze, sexual experiment, sentimentality and living on a knife-edge - scandalised the proprieties of mainstream America while simultaneously fascinating the burgeoning print and television media.

With the success of On the Road, Kerouac was swept on a tide of admirers and imitators as the celebrity of the Beats brought undoubted fame and recognition, particularly to the unholy alliance of the foursome which he immortalised in this and other novels. They pursued their hallucinogenic "new vision", primed with Benzedrine and booze, with readings of Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, the anarchistic influence of Californian Kenneth Rexroth and what Ginsberg called their "secret heroes", particularly jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. The "risk" of jazz, solo performances of searing emotional intensity, was the sound and structure Kerouac admired and attempted to reproduce along with the speech rhythms and phrasing of American English - so different from his native French-Canadian tongue. Indeed the rigid, Jansenist Catholic pieties of his upbringing clashed continuously throughout his life, as the freedoms he sought were held in check with guilt and paranoia.

Strangeness set in. Maher informs us that Kerouac "kept a lifelong list of every woman he had sex with, along with the type and frequency", though not, it seems, with the men.

In this extensive biography the gory details of Kerouac's life stack up in front of the uninitiated reader and obscure even further the writing upon which he expended such mind-altering energy. Little time is spent on the many books he wrote, and their reception is left largely unaccounted for and under-analysed. [note from Paul Maher: Mr. Dawe, you are an Irish scholar, you should be aware of W. B. Yeat's poem "the Choice." In it he states "The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life or of the work." Were you not aware which of those I chose?]

Caught in the headlights of his own celebrity, even in his final retreat, mulling over the lack of critical respect, rejecting the detractors, Kerouac's destructive spiral veered between aggressive, mocking narcissistic self-belief (check out his priceless Paris Review interview with Ted Berrigan) and the intoxicating, lethal frailties that unmanned him.

The western world does not make writers like Kerouac any more, only pale pretenders. Like many other forms of popular culture, writing is now part of the very media and entertainment business which Kerouac saw coming but could not outpace. The wretched diet of colloquial racism and anti-Semitism of his upbringing, inflamed by the rhetoric of McCarthyite 1950s, meant that Kerouac's politics were always going to be volatile and incoherent. No wonder he kept wind-side of the Hippy Sixties with their veneer of radical politics.

The tragedy is that no one seemed to mind (except boyhood pals and his old girlfriend whom he eventually married) and instead entertained his eventual fall. When that came, as Maher has it, Kerouac's body rejected "the donated blood" before "he lapsed into unconsciousness" where he lay "for 15 painful hours before being declared dead". He had literally killed himself with drink. Fifty years after its composition, the original 1951 version of On the Road "set a world record for the highest-paid bid for a literary manuscript at auction", bought for $2.43 million by the owner of the Indianapolis Colts football team.

Kerouac's Proustian plan, a series of interlinked novels, building into one great saga, was never completed. A ghost project, perhaps even a delusion, it haunted his imagination to the bitter end.

For Kerouac, freedom meant proving himself a difficult, moving target; when he slowed down the writing seems to have done the same. Not interested in his daughter, Jan, he had used up his friends until there were precious few capable of bearing the late-night drunken rants on long-distance calls.

Burroughs and Ginsberg outlived him; Neal Cassady, high on speed, Seconal and pulque, a potent Mexican drink, was found "comatose" by the train tracks to San Miguel; his unclaimed body was cremated and the ashes sent to his estranged wife.

Ill at ease outside America, suspicious even of those friends drawn to his obviously infectious personality, Kerouac was possibly happiest in the company of strangers - those whom he picked up on the road, in bars, diners, gas stations, on Greyhound buses; on the move, like himself, through the awe-inspiring magnificence of the American landscape; temporary, transit families of his own making, substitute brothers and fathers, providing uncomplicated emotional ties from which he could draw fictional life before fleeing again like a fugitive; running away, it looks like, from himself.

Gerald Dawe's poetry collections include Heart of Hearts, The Morning Train and Lake Geneva

Kerouac: The Definitive Biography By Paul Maher Jr Taylor Trade Publishing, 555pp. $27.95





Smoky Mountain News - North Carolina (September 29, 2004)

- Recommended Diversions -

Kerouac: The Definitive Biography

What makes Paul Maher’s story of Jack Kerouac, Beat writer and a tragic figure in American letters, stand out from other Kerouac biographies is his factual tone and his reliance on formal evidence in recounting Kerouac’s life and making a case for his place in American letters. Despite the slightly snotty title — I don’t see Maher’s book as being definitive except by his own assertion — the book should attract all who love Kerouac and all who wish to know more about his life. Other biographies may have given us more of a “feel” for Kerouac, but Maher gives us, as one reviewer wrote, a “nonfiction biography.” ---- Jeff Minick

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Charleston Post & Courier (September 5, 2004)

Kerouac portrait captures 'grandeur and grief'

KEROUAC. By Paul Maher Jr. Taylor. 558 pages. $27.95.
Jack Kerouac, branded the Marlon Brando of literature, altered culture with the publication of "On The Road" in 1957 and so thoroughly lived the Beat Generation life of his autobiographical character Sal Paradise that icon status was ensured until the last American takes to blacktop in search of cheap enlightenment.

But even Kerouac came to despise the twisted politicized label of "Beat," originally the wandering, poetic pursuit of lust, drugs, jazz, knowledge and "kicks." Ultimately, the very personification of Beat just wanted to be a great American novelist and "a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday."

It was never that simple, as Maher painstakingly illustrates in a remarkably thorough work that reads in parts like fiction throughout the "grandeur and grief."

The famed road-tripper never cut his mom's apron strings and lived with her for much of his adult life. The crusading experimenter hardened into a bitter conservative accused of anti-Semitism. The intellectual poet who met cronies Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady (the real-life "On The Road" lead character Dean Moriarity) during his Ivy League days came to Columbia as a jock on a football scholarship and invented a complex fantasy baseball game he privately enjoyed for decades.

For all the fame, Kerouac often was living on borrowed dollars before, during and after his several years of "On The Road" work.

"It's a great burden to be alive," Kerouac told interviewer Mike Wallace. "A heavy burden, a great big heavy burden. I wish I were safe in Heaven, dead."

Nearly constant drug and alcohol use took an obvious toll. Kerouac officially died of gastrointestinal hemorrhage brought on by cirrhosis of the liver at 47 in 1969 in, of all places, St. Petersburg, Fla.

Estranged fellow traveler Ginsberg summed up Kerouac's impact to an inquisitive college student: "Well, he was the first one to make a new crack in the consciousness."

Maher succeeds on many levels and nails the advertised "definitive biography." Kerouac's French Canadian roots are explored as deep as 1720 and his Lowell, Mass., childhood is as meticulously traced as the details of his death. The professional fan (Maher is the former editor of the Kerouac Quarterly and teaches a course on Kerouac at Middlesex Community College in Lowell) gives way to a master biographer who reports without pretense or agenda.

"I think you'll like him," Maher says of his transcendent subject in the preface. Here, he errs. The compelling, intoxicating Jack simply is too full of self-destruction to admire as a person. Kerouac "safe in Heaven, dead" left us wanting more.



Reviewer Gene Sapakoff is a sports columnist with The Post and Courier.

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Dallas Morning News (August 6, 2004)

Kerouac
The Definitive Biography
Paul Maher Jr.
(Taylor Publishing, $27.95)


In the late 1950s and '60s, you could divide young people pretty well by whether they liked On the Road. For some, it was a lot like the new rock 'n' roll, a denial of traditional values.

For those, Mr. Maher's biography will be a surprise. Kerouac was born of a French-Canadian family in Massachusetts. A high school athlete, he read literary classics and studied at Columbia University under Mark Van Doren.

After a stint in the Merchant Marine, he hooked his star to men like Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Neal Cassady. His was a hand-to-mouth existence of sexual voraciousness, heavy drug use and a self-destructive lifestyle. But Kerouac's dream of writing the great American novel never dimmed, though he never again had another On the Road.

He died in 1969 at 47.

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The Burlington Free Press (June 13, 2004)

This is the sixth major biography published on the "King of the Beats." Maher's book lacks the psychoanalytic insight of Ellis Amburn's "Subterranean Kerouac" (1998) and the interpretive literary analysis of Gerald Nicosia's "Memory Babe" (1983). The virtues of "Kerouac" are its concise prose style, inclusion of unpublished work by Kerouac, and refutation of anecdotal material uncritcally accepted and printed as fact by previous biographers. As sympathetic to its subject as Tom Clark's "Jack Kerouac: A Biography" (1984), "Kerouac" stands with its predecessors as fit testimony to a tumultuous life.
Wayne F. Burke, Montpelier, VT.
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Smoke (Summer issue)
The artistic urges and carefree, reckless lifestyle of the 1950s Beat generation is still most starkly and famously personified by the movement's enigmatic, controversial patron saint, Jack Kerouac. Kerouac was a walking contradiction: hopeless alcoholic and brilliant poet; blazè womanizer and devoted Catholic. In this in-depth examination, Maher takes a riveting look at the forces that shaped Kerouac's development into the original hipster artist, based wholly on the wealth of contemporary materials including letters, postcards, journals, and media accounts of the day.

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Library Journal
A book with the word definitive in the title is immediately judged on depth of content. For a subject as provocative as Jack Kerouac, this means comparison with a number of existing biographies, beginning with Ann Charter's Kerouac. Charters, a well-known chronicler of Beat writers, worked briefly with Kerouac before his death and interviewed many of his closest contemporaries. While her Beat writings have the advantage of those contacts, they have also been criticized for inaccuracies that have been repeated by other biographers. Indeed, Kerouac research was for decades limited because his personal journals were unavailable to scholars. That has all changed now that the New York Public Library holds the Kerouac archive, which forms the basis of Maher's work. For the most part, it constitutes just another part of the Kerouac story, further developing his childhood and his Franco-American heritage. It is therefore less a definitive biography than a useful piece in a difficult puzzle. It also suffers from a stark, flat prose style and an overwrought focus on Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, MA, where Maher, former editor of the Kerouac Quarterly, teaches English and writing. Still, it sheds new light on a writer of considerable interest. For public and academic libraries.-Eric C. Shoaf, Brown Univ. Lib., Providence Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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The man behind the myth: New biography reveals the real Jack Kerouac
By Chris Bergeron / News Staff Writer
Sunday, July 4, 2004

Growing up in Lowell, Paul Maher Jr. prowled the same streets Jack Kerouac eulogized in novels that sent generations of restless youth looking for kicks.

Maher was raised in the blue collar neighborhood of Centralville where Kerouac lived four decades before. Like Kerouac, he attended St. Joseph's School, prayed in St. Louis de France Church and fished the Merrimack River.

But back in the early 1980s, Maher's teachers hardly mentioned the Lowell-born Kerouac whose breakthrough novel "On The Road" foreshadowed social turmoil about to change America.

Maher, 40, has redeemed that hometown neglect with an insightful biography that chronicles the life, literary dreams and sad decline of one of America's most misunderstood writers.

Representing a decade's research, "Kerouac: The Definitive Biography" uses the author's letters, journals and lesser known writings to separate the private man from the public myth.

"I wanted to humanize Jack and tear away the iconic portrait that's haunted his legacy and kept him from being treated as a serious writer," said Maher."I wanted to show Jack as a living, breathing human with all his flaws but still show his growth as a writer."

Maher p

from http://www.akemplaw.com/wiki/?p=236

Saturday, October 13th, 2007...4:21 am
The Weekend: Jack Kerouac

Kerouac: His Life and Work, by Paul Maher Jr., is the most recent “big biography” (500+ pages) of the man who wrote On the Road, Big Sur, Doctor Sax, Desolation Angels, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, The Town and the City, Visions of Cody, and another score of lesser known books of fiction, poetry and ruminations. I am a big fan of Kerouac’s works, but I have come to the conclusion that you either like Kerouac, or you don’t like him. Still, reading On the Road (1957), an important American novel, seems like part of a basic liberal arts education to me.

Maher’s biography is based on access to a good deal more original material (letters, manuscripts, maps, etc.) than most other writers of Kerouac’s story have had access to. While there is thus more detail here than in, say, Ann Charters’ unauthorized biography of Jack, the detail does not overwhelm the story of a man driven to write – to try to makes sense of – his life story while it was actually happening. The portraits of Neal and Carolyn Cassady, William Burroughs, and especially Allen Ginsberg are fresh and shed light on all of them. Jack’s three woeful marriages, his thoroughly unhealthy attachment to his mother, and his odd French-Canadian-Buddhist version of Catholicism are also shown with more clarity than previously, I think. The scariest part of the book, and a long part it is, deals with Jack’s inability to deal with his own success, his own fame (infamy) as “King of the Beats,” and his ghastly descent into alcoholism, which killed him in his 40s. Thumbs up for this engaging biography. Incidentally, for a look at this era through the eyes of another one of the principal players, try Carolyn Cassady’s Off the Road.

_______________________________________________________
from www.oldwalrus.schraf.com (July 27, 2006)

"If we're not responsible for our actions, then life makes no sense and justice dies. Still, I pity Jack and I just hate what they did to him. So I cut him a lot of slack.
I have evidence by the way - it's in print. I read a book last fall called "Empty Phantoms: Collected Interviews with Jack Kerouac". It's the clearest picture I've seen of what exactly happened to him after "On The Road" hit so big.
William Buckley and Mike Wallace and guys like that - they treated him like a trained bear - an object for fun and ridicule. They crucified him with their cruel laughter and their mocking - I'll go that far.
Jack should have walked away. But he didn't. He just drank more.
Maybe he was already on the downhill slide, maybe he would never have written another great book after "Big Sur". We'll never know."

from B’Fhiú an Braon Fola - http://mikebegnal.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_
mikebegnal_archive.html

"For scholarship in book introductions, among these three [ed. note: George Condo's intro for Book of Sketches and A. M. Homes's intro for The Beat Generation] my vote goes to Paul Maher Jr., editor of Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac (Thunder’s Mouth Press). This book is an indispensable collection, including the renowned interview with Ted Berrigan among numerous others, along with more obscure features and articles not widely available heretofore. Almost every known interview with Kerouac is gathered here, which makes it an extremely important resource. Maher’s intro makes several things clear – one is that all that “beatnik” stuff was silly and stupid and not what Kerouac intended (in case you didn’t already know), and that his definition of Beat never accorded with what the mainstream media wanted to hear. Take this from his interview with Mike Wallace:

MW: What is the Beat Generation?
JK: Well, actually it’s just an old phrase. I knocked it off one day and they made a big fuss about it. It’s not really a generation at all.

As Maher writes, “Kerouac, too, was above all a poet. This he held before him as his banner and shield. Refining his public image was not part of his chemistry. It is in these interviews that we see evidence of a man constantly out of step with his times.” Maher’s view is certainly out of step with Homes’, for example, but undeniably what is finally important is the work, over the hype. Luckily there are some who are primarily interested in Kerouac’s actual writing, and utterances. The rest will eventually be seen for what it is, footnotes."


from www.textsandpretexts.com - MAY 2006:

"Near the end of a 1958 interview with Mike Wallace (then of the New York Post, later a fixture with TV’s 60 Minutes) Jack Kerouac admits that he is “tremendously sad.”

I’m in great despair.

Why?

It’s a great burden to be alive. A heavy burden, a great big heavy burden. I wish I were safe in Heaven, dead.

The same sentiment can be found in the 211th chorus of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, likely written years before the Wallace interview, during Kerouac’s 1955 stay in Mexico: “I wish I was free // Of that slaving meat wheel // And safe in heaven dead”; he knew a good line when he wrote one.

The Mike Wallace interview can be found in its entirety in Empty Phantoms, an exhaustive collection of “nearly all known printed, recorded, and filmed interviews” with Jack Kerouac. The same interview can be found in Conversations With Jack Kerouac, a much slimmer volume (100 pages vs 500 pages) from the University Press of Mississippi. I’m afraid that the latter volume can only be seen as a case of unfortunate timing, since (with one insignificant exception) Empty Phantoms contains everything that Conversations does and then some.

We have Kerouac interviewed in 1958 by Ben Hecht on his Chicago radio show; and in 1968 by William F. Buckley on Firing Line (I’ve seen a clip of Kerouac’s Firing Line appearance; it is painful to watch as Buckley baits and mocks a visibly inebriated Kerouac). It is sobering to realize that, just one year after this interview, Kerouac had achieved the freedom he’d despaired at finding a decade earlier: dead in Florida from an internal hemorrhage at the age of 47.

The only fault I can find with Empty Phantoms is its lack of an index; why Paul Maher Jr. would go to this much trouble (tracking down and transcribing obscure audio and video appearances by Kerouac; ransacking the microfilmed archives of ancient daily newspapers) to compile such a thorough collection, and then omit the index, is a mystery. It is a small but not insignificant flaw in an otherwise stellar effort."

A DETAILED COMPREHENSIVE DEFINITIVE LIFE OF KEROUAC, May 16, 2005 - Reviewer: Lachlan Jobbins (Sydney, Australia)

Paul Maher's "Kerouac: The Definitive Biography" is by far the most comprehensive and detailed account of Kerouac's life ever written. Unlike previous biographers, Maher has chosen wherever possible to rely for his work on Kerouac's own journals and letters. As such, this biography takes a necessarily different slant to other accounts. Whatever the perils of this approach (Kerouac, like all of us, had a propensity to mythologise his life in his private writings as much as in his novels), this book uncovers a wealth of new information that was previously unavailable.

Maher makes no claims to being a literary critic, so this biography is not the place to look for in-depth analysis of Kerouac's novels. (For that, Tim Hunt's "Kerouac's Crooked Road" is unmatched on "On the Road" and "Visions of Cody", and Gerald Nicosia's "Memory Babe" is great for a `big picture' analysis of the relationships between the life and the work). However, if you are looking to understand the forces that shaped Kerouac, his French-Canadian origins, small town upbringing and Catholicism, there is simply no better place to start.

Because of the unprecedented access Maher has had to the Kerouac archives, this biography uncovers a personal Kerouac that we have not seen before, and much detail on the final years of his life that previous biographers have not revealed. I read "Kerouac: The Definitive Biography" in conjunction with "Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954" and found it entirely consistent. Indeed, I wished that Douglas Brinkley had chosen to include more in the edited journals. As long as Kerouac's life continues to attract as much attention as his work, biographies will continue to be written. But it will be a long time before one as comprehensive as this is published.

P.S. The small matter of the editing inconsistencies in the footnotes is to be addressed in the next printing. This is a minor distraction to an otherwise excellent work, and the only reason I didn't give it five stars. Thoroughly recommended

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Definitely Definitive!, December 31, 2004
Reviewer: Nicholas Carroll (Smyrna, GA United States)

This is the sixth biography on Jack Kerouac that I've read and the one I like the most. Though not as comprehensive as "Memory Babe" by Gerald Nicosia (the longest biography on Kerouac thus far) or as analytical as "Subterranean Kerouac", this one was written with greater access to Kerouac's unpublished archives and new interviews by the author of people who knew Kerouac. The author did a respectful job on the subject, but doesn't gloss over the flaws of Kerouac, especially in the later chapters when Kerouac becomes an alcoholic nuisance to everyone who knew and loved him. Its a sad arc of a brilliant life ruined by his own success.

Ann Charters might get the credit for being the first biography of Kerouac, while Tom Clark has the easiest to read biography of Kerouac, but anyone who is a fan of the Beat Generation and the lead writer, should read this one, along with "Memory Babe." If you can stand revisiting Kerouac's life again and again from different perspectives, then try "Subterranean Kerouac" and Tom Clark's biography.

I also love the cover photo of this book and the way chapters are laid out, with various yet relevant quotes to start each chapter, and well thought out chapter titles. He does Kerouac justice, featuring well annotated end notes and other interesting items in an appendix. If you only read one Kerouac biography, this is the one you must read for a good understanding of Kerouac and his difficult life. There is only one major flaw in this book, and its a typo that I'm surprised no one caught before publication. Apparently, the publisher added a sentence or two that Paul Maher wrote to his editor or agent that should not have been included into the narrative. It was confusing at first, but when I figured out what probably happened, I just had to laugh. Even publishing companies aren't perfect about catching mistakes like that before publication.
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Excellent Addition, December 20, 2004
Reviewer: R. Burgess (boston) - See all my reviews
I too am troubled by the Publishers Weekly review- which seems to have an agenda of its own!

This biography is very well sourced- and although perhaps not completely objective- why shouldn't one be a fan of what one is writings about? Many great popular historians are. David McCollough certainly appears to fall in love with every subject matter he writes about- and that provides in and of itself a unique spin, present here.

I frankly believe that there is room for scholarship by someone who actually has a clear knowledge and appreciation for Kerouac's roots...and Maher is very effective in dealing in particular with Jack's french canadien heritage; catholicism, and, yes, i would venture to guess, unlike his critics at PW- he can find Lowell on a map !

Maher has written an excellent "biography"- not an editorial opinion piece which provided this reader with a great starting point for delving further into the subject matter...

This book- in conjunction with the Brinkley book- will serve its purpose- not to airbrush history- but rather get beyond the stereotypes attributed to the Kerouac "name"- but far removed from the "individual" himself...
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Journal Notes, November 16, 2004
Reviewer: Steve Dossey "Dog Leg Left Over Deep Ellum"

What this biography brings is a heavy reliance on Jack's journal entries heretofore not available to other biographers. But the assumption this is the definitive biography is a bit of a stretch...because the book is heavily influenced by those notes and the author's knowledge of Lowell where he has lived. Kerouac was above all a creative writer and obviously a great chronicler of events. Even so this does not mean his notes are any more definitive of his life than other information we have about him. He was always writing with foreknowledge or belief someone would be reading his writing. Important junctures in Kerouac's life are given short shrift (his complex emotional relationship with Neal and Carolyn for example) because they have already been written about in great depth and detail--- Instead, the holy grail of Keroauc's notes are determined to be the deciding factor. The author brings up Ginsburg's campaign against Kerouac after his death but never really explores that topic to its justified exposition. It was clear that Ginsburg changed his tune and his memories as time went on after Jack's death..(Look at the quotes in the Subterranean Kerouc). This book lacks capturing the essence and the importance of Kerouac as a writer. Tho Charters book is assumed to be flawed for lack of direct access to documented information, etc-- it still stands out there as trying to capture Jack's essence as well as describing sentinal events in his life. This biography is in need of better editing because events described in one chapter are repeated in another but in a slightly different time frame (such as the books Jack was reading at the time). Lastly, tho I would not dismiss this book like the Subterranean Kerouac, it is yet another take on the Kerouac who was as well hidden during his life as he is now.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Engaging and Unbiased Biography, September 17, 2004
Reviewer: Laura Sanders "Laura" (Worcester, Massachusetts) - See all my reviewsIn Mr. Maher's new biography of Kerouac, all of the "myths" of the Beat icon have been underscored by letters and journal entries from on and off the road. Reading from these primary sources and letting Kerouac and company do the talking frees the readers from the biased interviews from Kerouac's contemporaries that have been the curse and blessing of most previous biographies (excepting Ellis Amburn's troubled but interesting Subterranean Kerouac). When ole' Jack is hiding in the riverbed under the sweep of flashlights from railroad security, it reads as if from a Kerouac novel. Later when he cooks cans of beans at a fire in a ditch, writes poetry in a San Francisco alley or bitterly complains of his publishers trying to edit his uncompromising prose, Maher makes plain his intention, to bring to the reader a glimpse into Kerouac's world, one of ambition, indigence and later, the harrowing descent into alcoholism. Though Maher does not relentlessly harp on Kerouac's addiction, he does bring out the tragic consequences; barroom beatings (which Kerouac does not defend himself), the drying up of his powder-keg creativity, and stretches of poverty only relieved by the occasional paltry royalty checks (most coming from foreign publishers).
As far as one of the reviewer's complaint about Maher's claim that the other beats set out to destroy Kerouac's reputation, it isn't quite as heavy-handed as that. Maher documents Ginsberg's (and only Ginsberg) frequent interviews in which he explicitly details Kerouac's alleged anti-Semitism, homo/bisexuality, and sordid relations with his mother. Maher contends that our premier beat poet only made these things known immediately after Kerouac's premature death in 1969. Ginsberg, it turns out, had been turned away from the Kerouac archives that he had relentlessly tried to take control of even into the 1990s. Now, I like some of Ginsberg's poetry, but he did seem rather despicable and a bit of a lecher when I met him a few times in the eighties on into the early 1990's.
Lastly, with Amazon's sale price of a 550+ page hardcover for under $20.00, Maher's usage of unpublished material and the estate's own endorsement (I don't think they ever did that for anybody else . . .ever), it is worth a read for there are many details about the man's life that lie in the dark beforehand, particularly the formative development of Kerouac art.
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Ultimately, A Disappointment, September 17, 2004
Reviewer: Randall E. Lathan "Bradley the Buyer" (Raleigh, NC USA)
I awaited this new biography with much anticipation, however felt rather let down in the end. This is clearly a work done with the blessing of the Sampas family in order to somewhat "rehabilitate" Kerouac's reputation. Maher comes across as not really caring for all those unsavory Beats like Ginsberg and Burroughs. They all ended up corrupting this callow youth from Lowell. He goes so far as to suggest that Ginsberg engaged in a smear campaign against Kerouac's reputation after Jack's death. Now I truly love and admire the work of Jack Kerouac...but come on!

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Very Detailed and Comprehensive, September 11, 2004
Reviewer: J. E. Robinson

This is a new biography about 500 pages long covering virtually all of the life of Jack Kerouac. It is written by a long time Kerouac "fan and student", a local Lowell, Mass. High-school teacher Paul Maher. Basically it is a sold and well written book.

I do have a couple of very minor problems about the biography concerning the level of detail. I think for the average reader it is almost too much detail about the non-creative side of his life, and it might have been better to have a bit less detail about his marriages and more details on his books and how they evolved and fit in with his life - but that is just my personal preference. That is why I am giving it 4 stars not 5. For example While Kerouac is at Columbia and at many other times the author gives us seemingly day to day accounts of what he did, or at a minimum week by week. It is a type of writing of overcompensation. But that is my view, some will like the reams of detail.

The book starts of with the Keouac family in New Hampshire around 1720 and a good part of the book explores his family and childhood, especially his Lowell years. The author has included a nice collection of black and white photographs taken of Kerouac during the different stages of his life including some family photos. Pictures of his family in Lowell with his older brother and younger sister make Jack appear almost normal. Later we see him in a bar scene and other scenes wearing for example a rustic plaid shirt and pictures with his wives.

The book appears to very complete and covers his parents and their problems, his creative and free spirit growing up, his scholarship to Columbia, football practice, interaction with the other writers, it describes his thoughts and what he reads and writes, his navy career, three marriages and his famous friends or associates. Of course we hear about Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, the latter being his traveling companion in his famous novel On the Road. This was the famous "beat" movement - as most people are well aware. There are quite a few Ginsberg and Cassady references sprinkled through the book, and there are a lot of details on his marriages and divorces.

Jack led an intensive life, often clashing with authorities, traveled widely, wrote a lot, and moved a lot then died young at the age of 47 from a failing liver caused by too much drink. He left his mark in the literary world as a remarkable writer with a unique style. The book covers a lot of ground, both good and bad mainly on his personal life and especially his Lowell Massachusetts connection. The book is divided into many short chapters, each covering a short segment of his life, such as trips to Mexico, Denver, etc. and how he was changed by success - he did not like it. Having read some other biographies where I could compare at least two different authors of two different books, it is clear that any biography is dependent upon the author and his bias. Not being a Kerouac expert it is beyond my ability to and most readers to make those distinctions in the present case, but it seems accurate and relatively neutral in tone. It gives the good and some bad, and is not just a fawning positive fan book, and with much detail and comment.

Solid job, lots of detail for Kerouac lovers, 4 stars, possibly 5.


A fascinating glimpse into a troubled life, June 2, 2004
Reviewer: A reader

I'm amazed at the review by Publishers's Weekly listed above. If this is a "gushing fan letter" from Maher to Kerouac, I'd hate to see what Maher would write about someone he really didn't like!

The greatest strength of this biography, for me, was the detail Maher provides about Kerouac's daily life. So many biographies give you a series of highlights
and "events" but don't give you any sense of what the subject's life was like on a day-by-day basis. This biography actually answers the questions "What did Kerouac do when he got up in the morning? What did he do on an average day?" It in fact destroys any heroic, romantic image you might have of Kerouac and replaces it with a detailed image of who Kerouac really was---how he spoke; the way he approached writing; how he conducted his relationships; his intense, desperate, peripatetic wanderings. I found it to be a very unusual and interesting glimpse into a very, very troubled life.