The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac

In The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, Joyce Johnson, author of her classic memoir, Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac, 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. Johnson explores how Kerouac’s French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider’s vision of America and 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.