Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

From Publishers Weekly
Much of Kerouac's reputation rests on his first two novels, and these selections from a series of spiral notebooks into which the fledgling author constantly poured story ideas and private thoughts offer an intimate perspective on those novels' development. Anybody who's ever started a novel will grasp Kerouac's obsession with his daily word count and the periodic frustration and self-doubt. "I know that I should never have been a writer," Kerouac laments at one dark moment; in another, he wonders, "Why doesn't God appear to tell me I'm on the right track?" Historian Brinkley, author most recently of a book on John Kerry (Tour of Duty), addresses this religious devotion in an introduction that effectively establishes the historical context, clarifying, too, just how much time Kerouac really spent refining the allegedly spontaneous On the Road. Still, there's plenty of the familiar Kerouac on hand: all-night drunken conversations with other Beat writers, casual sexual encounters and a final notebook entitled "Rain and Rivers," filled with real-life episodes in an early version of the freewheeling style that transformed Kerouac from a promising young novelist to a literary legend. These journals are an essential resource for American literature scholars, but the force of Kerouac's personality makes them an engrossing read for lay admirers. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–These entries cover Kerouac's mid-20s, when he was completing his first novel, The Town and the City, and beginning what were to become Dr. Sax and On the Road. Much of the book is devoted to issues of writing–character, plot, style–and a daily obsession with word count that any writer will appreciate. Discussions of favorite authors like Céline, Twain, and Dostoyevsky highlight some influences, and Kerouac shows his early iconoclastic tendencies through an almost rampant hatred of academics and the literary establishment. Anecdotes about partying with Allen Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs, the New York jazz world, and finding a girlfriend are peppered throughout. The final section is devoted to the cross-country trip made with Neal Cassady and others that inspired On the Road. These narratives of the landscapes of the U.S. and Mexico are hauntingly beautiful and contain hints of the quasi-spontaneous style that made both Kerouac and the Beat movement so different and so popular. The introduction, notations, and index are invaluable to those less familiar with the time period or Kerouac's life. But the real charm of this title is in his words; seeing this young, brilliant author develop and continually push himself toward greatness is gripping and astonishing. The reality of Kerouac proves far more moving and interesting than the bad-boy image.–Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale

From Booklist
The Kerouac archive continues to yield gold. Readers have encountered the discerning, observant, spiritual, and driven writer behind the glamorized iconographic Beat image in Kerouac's revealing letters. Now historian Brinkley ably and avidly introduces the lustrous and awe-inspiring journals Kerouac kept from mid-1947 to early 1954, the years during which he wrote his first novel, The Town and the City, and the novel that made him famous, On the Road. Here Kerouac meticulously records how many words he writes each day, what he's reading, and the nature of his moods. He writes character sketches and test-drives scenes. He makes resolutions, comments fervently on the state of the American soul, and describes places he travels to, wild binges, and epic conversations. And he gives thanks to God. Ravenous and raving, exacting and lyrical, exalted and despairing, profoundly receptive to the world and relentlessly introspective, Kerouac, as much a mystic as he was an artist, sought redemption in writing and wrote like a desolate angel. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
Jack Kerouac is best known through the image he put forth in his autobiographical novels. Yet it is only his prolific journals, in which he set down the raw material of his life and thinking, that reveal to us the real Kerouac—his true, honest, deep, private, philosophical self. In Windblown World, distinguished Americanist Douglas Brinkley has gathered a selection of journal entries from the most pivotal period of Kerouac’s life, 1947–1954. Here is Kerouac as a hungry young writer finishing his first novel, The Town and City, while forging crucial friendships with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Truly a self-portrait of the artist as a young man, these journals show a sensitive soul charting his own progress as a writer and responding to his literary forebears. Finally and perhaps most appealing to Kerouac’s legion of fans, the journals tell of the events that would eventually be immortalized in On the Road, as Kerouac narrates two trips across the United States and Mexico and slowly cultivates his idea for a jazz novel. This unique and indispensable volume is sure to garner major critical attention and become an integral element of the Beat oeuvre.

About the Author
Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922 and died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969. He is the author of the Beat classic On the Road and his other works include The Dharma Bums and Big Sur. Douglas Brinkley is professor of history and director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans. He is the award-winning author of twelve books, including, most recently, Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War.


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An eclectic sampling of the many facets of the legendary peripatetic writer, selected from assorted journals and notebooks Kerouac kept during the time he was working on his first two novels. Editor Brinkley acknowledges that this is not for scholars: he has silently cut portions, rearranged others, eliminated the author's doodles and marginalia, and supplied only a modest number of footnotes. Instead, this is an edition for temperate Kerouac fans (true fanatics must await a more scholarly treatment) and for those handful of folks who have never heard of On the Road. Still, the footnotes are not always complete (Brinkley's comment about Hecuba, for example, neglects to mention that Kerouac is alluding to Hamlet in the passage); nor does the editor gloss every allusion (he neglects to tell us that a Randolph Scott film Kerouac refers to is probably Trail Street, 1947). Cavils aside, the volume has numerous virtues, the most significant of which is the much more capacious Kerouac it reveals. Readers who know him only as a "Beat Generation" writer will be surprised to see the depth of his religious struggles (included are some psalms Kerouac composed) and to learn of his devotion to his mother. Some readers may marvel that one of his favorite novelists was Anthony Trollope, that he loved Major League baseball (in some passages he compares his performance to a hitter's), that he chided himself occasionally for not working out at the Y, that he revised repeatedly and tenaciously (no "automatic writer," Kerouac). Readers will probably not be surprised to read his accounts of binge-drinking (he died of cirrhosis at 47), of his passions for Melville, Dostoyevsky, and Twain, of his obsessions fortravel (back and forth across the country, time after time). In these journals appears some of that Whitmanesque energy and effluence and exuberance (and superfluity) for which his fiction is known. Brinkley's intelligent choices allow us to see both the familiar Kerouac and a mysterious stranger as well. (b&w illustrations)Agency: Sterling Lord Literistic


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