Showing results by author "Paul Maher Jr." in All Categories

Jack Kerouac was one of America's great writers of the latter half of the twentieth century, yet he endured a life characterized by persistent hardship and disillusion. Leading Kerouac scholar Paul Maher Jr. targets the writer's embattled insight of self as central to his life and work. He reveals how Kerouac's troubled interactions with alcohol, drugs, and spirituality stamped its importance on his autobiographical prose and poetry and created a singular language that united thoughts on the human condition and spiritual liberation.

Jack Kerouac’s archive is vast. Throughout his life he was constantly writing, and he meticulously saved and catalogued his material. The result is that beyond the work published in his lifetime there has been a rich stream of posthumous writing that is far from tapped. This collection of previously unpublished writing culled from the Kerouac archive, and as a companion to Paul Maher Jr.'s Becoming Kerouac, spans Kerouac’s adult life, from a journal written at age seventeen to autobiographical reflections a few years before his death.

Becoming Kerouac is a podcast hangout discussing everything Jack Kerouac by the author and editor of BECOMING KEROUAC: A Writer In His Time (Lyons Press, 2023); EMPTY PHANTOMS: Interviews & Encounters With Jack Kerouac (2005); KEROUAC: His Life & Work (2004) and a forthcoming volume of unpublished Kerouac writings (Edited by Paul Maher Jr. & Charles Shuttleworth) titled SELF-PORTRAIT:  Collected Unpublished Writings (Rare Bird/Sal Paradise Press) (2024). Who was Jack Kerouac? What books did he write? Did he drink Caffe Lattes? Books to life to everything else. Future episodes will feature ...