The Voice Is All; The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac

New York, N.Y.: Viking, 2012. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Tom Palumbo (Jacket photograph), and Mellon Tytell. xx, [2], 489, [1] pages. Includes Introduction, Acknowledgments, Notes, and Index. Part One covers Franco-American Ghosts; Part Two covers A Half-American Boyhood; Part Three covers An Uprooting; Part Four covers The War; Part Five covers The Libertine Circle; Part Six covers Postwar; Part Seven covers Postwar; Part Seven covers "White Ambitions."; Part Eight covers "Rain and Rivers"; Part Nine covers The "Rush of Truth"; and Part Ten covers Interior Music. Joyce Johnson is an American author of fiction and nonfiction. She was born Joyce Glassman in 1935 to a Jewish family in New York City and raised in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, a few blocks from the apartment of Joan Vollmer Adams where William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac lived from 1944 to 1946. She was a child actress and appeared in the Broadway production of I Remember Mama, which she writes about in her 2004 memoir Missing Men. In the first month of 1957, Johnson met Jack Kerouac on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac is a person who encourages Johnson to write her first book in 1962. However, the love affair between them lasted only two years and led her in writing a memoir entitled Minor Characters which was published in 1983. The memoir reflects on her life between 1957 and 1958, especially about her relationship with Kerouac. It also highlighted Kerouac who rose from obscurity to fame following the publication of his novel On the Road in 1957. This book presents a revelatory portrayal of Jack Kerouac, not only in the midst of his tumultuous existence in postwar Manhattan and his fateful encounters with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and John Clellon Holmes, but in the periods of solitary struggle and visionary inspiration that produced his work. It sheds new light on the composition of On The Road, documenting how Kerouac's legendary "spontaneous" writing was preceded by a series of abandoned novels in which characters, episodes, and story lines were continually reshuffled. By liberating Kerouac from the inadequate and misleading label "King of the Beats," Johnson creates a new, even more haunting and compelling image of him, drawn from what he himself wrote in his private papers. This groundbreaking, much needed biography significantly deepens our understanding of Kerouac's achievement as a writer, and will change the way his books are read in the future. A groundbreaking portrait of Kerouac as a young artist from the award-winning author of Minor Characters. In The Voice is All, Joyce Johnson, author of her classic memoir, Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac, brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac s French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road, followed by Visions of Cody. By illuminating Kerouac's early choice to sacrifice everything to his work, The Voice Is All deals with him on his own terms and puts the tragic contradictions of his nature and his complex relationships into perspective.