Jack Kerouac

I've read a lot about old J.K. over the years, but no one, to my mind, has ever summarized his life story with such insight and concision as John Clellon Holmes:

"The tragedy--I shouldn't even call it that--but the irony is that he worked so hard to project, to put on paper and project in the world a vision, his own particular vision ... He'd worked really very selflessly out of his genius to get it down, and then when it came back to him, when it was accepted, from his point of view, for the wrong reasons, he didn't know how to handle it ... Jack had tremendous areas of--I'm loath to call it ignorance, but they were. But that's what made him good. If he'd known how the world worked he never would have broken his heart over it." --Jack's Book, 318.