Kerouac Biographer Gets Back on the Road

The Daily Beast, Oct. 2 , 2014

Thirty-five years ago, Dennis McNally wrote a life of Beat icon Jack Kerouac. Looking back, he sees things in the book he’s proud of and a couple of things that make him wince.

Re-reading your own work, especially at some temporal distance, is a dangerous business. “How could I have written something so, so (fill in the negative adjective)?”  But recently I did, and it proved surprising, not at all what I’d anticipated. 

In 1979 I published Desolate Angel/Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. I’d written it as a doctoral dissertation for the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, but I’d always intended to aim it at the public—in fact, when I finished the (largely handwritten!) first draft, I dramatically vowed to do no further work until someone paid me.  

On the other hand, I had no agent and was also pretty clueless about selling to a commercial press, so it was the greatest of luck for me that Carolyn Cassady, Neal (“Dean Moriarity” in On the Road) Cassady’s widow, heard that a young editor at Random House, Kathy Matthews, was seeking a Kerouac biography. Kathy took me on, and after a fair amount of sturm und drang—young writers do think every word is precious!—my book came out. 

I loved the research and writing of a dissertation, but not the academic world, and after the book was published I got by with some odd jobs while I plotted and schemed on how to write the next book, which would turn out to be A Long Strange Trip/The Inside History of the Grateful Dead.

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