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For those who think Kerouac had some cool Beat life -- forget it. The poor man was a disaster. This great bio doesn't stint on the details, which eventually add up to a brutal portrait of a writer who just couldn't keep it together. Keep what together, you ask? Everything... Including his writing, which contains flashes of brilliance, but also a fair share of drivel.

The last part of Nicosia's book is grueling. It is Kerouac now totally off the rails, out of touch with any reality. Family and friends all suffered not only from the heartbreak of seeing JK in such a state, but also from being treated so poorly by him.

Of course JK never wanted to be King of the Beats -- that was something Ginsberg steered him towards; though even Ginsberg has said there was no such thing as the Beat Movement -- "It was just a bunch of guys trying to get published." That may be a bit ingenuous, but he was right about the "guys" part. Women in Kerouac's life sphere were there for the pleasure of their men. And if they weren't, the Beats saw them as making their lives hell by asking them to follow the simplest, most basic rules of society -- which they were incapable of doing.

While On the Road was hyped as a search for America, even a surface reading of it will show that it was Kerouac searching for Neal Cassady, spiritually and sometimes geographically. NC wends his way in and out of this bio ultimately causing JK sadness and soul sickness. Is On the Road a lie, as JK put lowlife Cassady on a pedestal as "Dean Moriarty," managing to get generations to worship at the shrine of a supposed "free spirit?" Just asking...

Romanticized to death, today it is hard to realize how reviled the Beat writers were by the literary establishment of their day. And none more than their figurehead, Kerouac. Ginsberg (who got hit with plenty of slings and arrows too) was instrumental in putting him up there, a fact that wasn't lost on Kerouac.

Interestingly, a YouTube video features Kerouac on the William Buckley show Firing Line, not long before JK's death. He alternately comes off as a petulant child and a bellowing oaf, barely connecting to the conversation going on around him. When Ginsberg's name comes up (he was in the audience) Kerouac gives "thumbs down." It's like Frankenstein's monster, blaming his creator for the misery that befell him in a life he never asked for. The difference in the story is that the monster never destroyed his creator. Though one might argue that the opposite occurred.