I became intent on saving him through showing him that he was loved.

If I’m still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre–the poems, the poems!–in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac’s horrendous...

I have tonight begun reading a stupid, shitty book by Kerouac called Big Sur, and I would give a ball to wake up tomorrow on some empty ridge with a herd of beatniks grazing in...

Tis true what Hemingway says–if we’re lucky enough to live our dreams in youth, as Ernest Hemingway did in 1920’s Paris and I did with the Beat poets, then youth’s dreams become a moveable feast...

writers like Jack Kerouac (who called himself an “urban Thoreau”) set forth to redefine and rediscover ways to live in America without slogging through what Kerouac called the endless system of “work, produce, consume, work,...

I sit down and say, and I run all my friends and relatives and enemies one by one in this, without entertaining any angers or gratitudes or anything, and I say, like ‘Japhy Ryder, equally...

…and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.

…Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim ‘Never let the right hand know what your left hand is doing’…Page 100.

Kerouac: You’re ruining American poetry, O’Hara.O’Hara: That’s more than you ever did for it, Kerouac

I was always aware that Jack loved women not only for their bodies but for the stories that came into being as they interacted with him–they were part of his “road,” the infinite range of...