“Of all that is written, I love only what a man has written with his blood.” Once, when starting a novel, Beat writer Jack Kerouac took this Nietzsche saying literally, and, in the words of Paul Maher Jr., “to its extreme by cutting his finger and smearing the word BLOOD in blood on its title page.
” Maher’s biography, “Becoming Kerouac: A Writer in His Time,” is a story of extremes, because its subject was a man of extremes. Maher, who lives in Lubec, knows the lay of this land. In 2004 his book, “Kerouac: His Life and Work” appeared to great acclaim.
At the time, American composer, David Amram, said, “He (Maher) has written a truly definitive portrait, done with a purity of intent that shines through each page,” while Vanity Fair urged, “Tune in, all you desolation angels and dharma bums, and turn on to Paul Maher’s jazzy bio of Kerouac.” “Becoming Kerouac: A Writer in His Time” By Paul Maher Jr. Lyons Press Hardcover, 318 pages $34.
95 “Becoming Kerouac” more deeply explores the writer’s life from 1949, when Kerouac left his home in Lowell, Massachusetts, through 1957, just before his life-changing (both for himself and the world) novel, “On the Road,” was published. Or, in Maher’s words, Kerouac’s “creative trajectory to a fully evolved author of his era.” A trajectory of repetitive cycles of writing, travel, alcohol and drug binging, and forming, and rapidly dissolving, relationships with friends and lovers.
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