Jack's book

Jack's Book is an oral biography of Jack Kerouac, the writer who helped define the Beat Generation. Rather than offering a single narrator, Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee assemble the story from the recollections of people who knew Kerouac across the different stages of his life.

The voices come from friends, fellow writers and others who shared his days, and together they sketch the restless, often troubled man behind On the Road. Readers get a close look at his creative circle, his drinking and his fraught relationships, presented as a patchwork of memories that sometimes agree and sometimes contradict one another.