While a legend has developed about the man Jack Kerouac, there has not been a thorough study of what he wrote. This is the first book to explore his place in American literature by establishing the total design of his work. Regina Weinreich contends that Kerouac wrote with this "grand design" in mind: that he thought of his works as "one vast book" a "Divine Comedy of Buddha" that he called The Legend of Duluoz. The nature of Kerouac's "spontaneous bop prosody" is discussed in relation to the work of Thomas Wolfe and Henry Miller. Kerouac compared his "loose style" to that of a jazz horn-player sounding one long note. While this explains Kerouac's method, Weinreich seeks further to define the unity of his works, from The Town and the City, On the Road, and Visions of Cody to Desolation Angels and Vanity of Duluoz, which she argues brings the legend full circle. "Regina Weinreich draws together the threads of artistic influences that ultimately define Jack's writing...."William Burroughs "Regina Weinreich has done Kerouac's work the long overdue favor of the attention of a first rate mind...."John Clellon Holmes

Regina Weinreich is the author of numerous articles on the Beat Generation published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Village Voice, San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, Talk Magazine, Omni, and the literary magazines Paris Review and Five Points. She is a producer/director of the documentary, Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider, and a writer on The Beat Generation: An American Dream. Currently compiling Kerouac's Book of Haiku for Viking Press, she teaches at The School of Visual Arts in New York City