Tag Archives: Paul Maher Jr.

Official Synopsis for Burning Furiously Beautiful

6 Jun

You probably have a pretty good idea by now of what Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is about, but here’s the official synopsis:

Fueled by coffee and pea soup, Jack Kerouac speed-typed On the Road in just three weeks in April 1951. He’d been traveling America for the past ten years and now, at last, the furious energy of his experiences flowed through his fingertips in a mad rush, pealing forth on a makeshift scroll that he laboriously taped together. The On the Road scroll has since become literary legend, and now Burning Furiously Beautiful sets the record straight, uncovering, among other things, the true story behind one of America’s greatest novels.

With unprecedented access to Kerouac’s journals and letters, Burning Furiously Beautiful explores the real lives of the key characters of the novel—Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty, Carlo Marx, Old Bull Hubbard, Camille, Marylou, and others. Ride along on the real-life adventures through 1940s America that inspired On the Road. By tracing the evolution of Kerouac’s literary development and revealing his startlingly original writing style, this book explains how it took years—not weeks—to ultimately write the seemingly sporadic 1957 novel, On the Road. This revised and expanded edition of Jack Kerouac’s American Journey (2007) takes a closer look at the rise of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation.

Paul Maher Jr. is the author of the critically acclaimed biography Kerouac: His Life and Work and Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac.

Stephanie Nikolopoulos is an editor and writer based in New York City.

Maher and Nikolopoulos are currently co-authoring Visions of Kerouac for Rowman & Littlefield (2014).

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Life after the MFA

5 Jun

As thesis submission deadline approached, people began asking me what I was planning on doing after graduation.  Then they’d stop themselves, afraid they may have asked too painful of a question.  But it’s not!

In one of my last posts, I left off telling you about grabbing a cup of tea after turning my theses in.  What I didn’t tell you was that on my walk back to my office, while sipping that delicious tea, I made a phone call to biographer Paul Maher Jr.  Paul’s books are some of the most well respected in his categories, and they’ve been translated and sold around the globe.

Inspired by Laura Vanderkam’s List of 100 Dreams, I created my own a while back.  Become a scholar on the Beat Generation was on my list.  I’ve been studying the writers generally categorized as Beat for more than a decade now.  I did my MFA at The New School, where Jack Kerouac took writing classes, and where I connected with writers who had known Jack Kerouac.

Now, my dream of becoming a Beat scholar is being realized.  Paul and I are working on a book that tells the true story of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.  The phone call to him on Monday was to discuss cover ideas.

I don’t have a big life-altering answer to the question of what I’m doing after the MFA.  Paul and I have been working on this book for a while now, and since I won’t be simultaneously working on a thesis anymore I’ll simply be refocusing my creative energies into the book.  It helps that I didn’t enter the program straight out of undergrad.  I’d already been working in book publishing, a career many of my classmates are hoping to enter, and so graduation isn’t a big scary unknown for me.  I’ll be continuing in my editorial role.  For me, life after the MFA is about continuing to follow my passions while also seizing new opportunities.

I’m extremely excited to say that my post-MFA plan is to co-author a book on Jack Kerouac.

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Sneak Peek of the Burning Furiously Beautiful Cover

31 May

Here’s a sneak peek of the cover design for Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which I am co-authoring with critically acclaimed Kerouac scholar Paul Maher Jr.

Award-winning designer Igor Satanovsky created the cover.  Igor also happens to be a poet in his own right and studied poetry under Allen Ginsberg at City University of New York-Brooklyn College.

Can’t wait to share more with you!

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Jack Kerouac, Music Journalist

9 May

When Jack Kerouac went off to Columbia University, he told people he was going to be a journalist.  His father, Leo Kerouac, was a printer in Lowell, who owned a print shop called Spotlight Print.  Leo handled printing for some of the big businesses in New England, and also did a bit of writing of his own.  This inspired Ti Jean, as little Jack was called.  He used to lay on the floor, creating his own little newspapers and comics.

In school in New York, first at Horace Mann prep school and then at Columbia, Kerouac contributed to the school newspapers.  The writing he did for the papers would best be described as music journalism.  He soaked in all the great 1940s bebop of Harlem and wrote jazz reviews.

There was no Pitchfork at the time.  Rolling Stone magazine wasn’t founded until 1967.  Even many of today’s popular jazz magazines weren’t in existence yet.  Music journalism didn’t have the esteem that it does today.

Jack Kerouac may not have gone on to become a famous music critic or any sort of journalist in the traditional sense of the word, but his jazz reviews were not in vain.  Writing music reviews, he honed his craft.  He learned to listen well, and he learned how to recreate the excitement of a live gig on the page.  This all went into his future novels.  In On the Road, Kerouac wrote about experiencing jazz firsthand.  Today, his books, even if they contain fictional elements, are testaments to the music of the 1940s and ‘50s.  Although he may have obscured the names of his friends, the names of musicians and famous jazz clubs remain intact.

Furthermore, bebop style influenced the way Kerouac wrote.  He learned about the notion of spontaneity and incorporated it into his own work.  His writing style echoes the rawness and the genius of live, spontaneous jazz.

In Burning Furiously Beautiful, Paul Maher Jr. and I write about some of the great jazz clubs of the 1940s and ‘50s that Kerouac visited while he criss-crossed the country.  The book tells the true story behind On the Road.  It is a portrait of Jack Kerouac, but it’s also a portrait of the United States.  In mentioning these jazz clubs that Kerouac visited, we examine a bit of America’s cultural history.

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On the Road Trailer

29 Mar

 

In case for some reason you haven’t seen the trailer for Walter Salles’ On the Road, screenplay by Jose Rivera, here it is.  It will star Sam Riley as Sal Paradise, Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty, Kristen Stewart as Marylou, Kirsten Dunst as Camille, Tom Sturridge as Carlo Marx, Viggo Mortensen as Old Bull Lee, Amy Adams as Jane, Alice Braga as Terry, and Danny Morgan as Ed Dunkel.

Cast your opinions in the comments section….

From a purely cinematic standpoint, the landscape looks beautiful.  I’ve been following the production of the film for a while and paying particular attention to filming locations.  If you think about it, The United States is a character in the book and in the film so it deserves attention, and I think Walter Salles, who directed The Motorcycle Diaries, can accomplish that.

The book I’m coauthoring with Paul Maher Jr., Burning Furiously Beautiful, details the places Jack Kerouac visited and was inspired by when writing On the Road.  If you check out our Pinterest board, you can see just how incredible the landscape and history of the places Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty visit are.

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Burning Furiously Beautiful on Pinterest

19 Mar

Burning Furiously Beautiful, the book on Jack Kerouac I’m collaborating on with Paul Maher Jr., is taking shape.  Paul suggested I make a Pinterest board based on the book, and I’m super excited about the way it came out.  So far I’ve cataloged photographs with captions to tell the story of part 1 of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.  It’s such a fun way to explore a story.

Want to check it out?  I’d love to hear your feedback.

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The Rumors Are True

31 Jan

 

Life can be so surreal sometimes.  One day you can be reading a book — and not long after that you can be co-authoring a book with the very same author whose book you once read.

A few years back, I was reading Paul Maher, Jr.’s, Jack Kerouac’s American Journey on the 6 train in New York.  Now, as you can read on his website, we’re co-authoring a revised and expanded edition called Burning Furiously Beautiful.

I’m so excited to be working with Paul.  Here’s a little bit of his bio from his website:

Paul Maher, Jr., is a seasoned leader of Kerouac scholarship; what’s more, many of Kerouac’s family, friends, and contemporaries (including Joyce Johnson and David Amram) endorse the fresh, unbiased perspective he uses to retell the life and work of this great American writer.

…

Maher’s Kerouac: The Definitive Biography (Taylor Trade Publishing, June 2004), is the first biography to be based entirely on primary sources. It is the most thoroughly researched and comprehensive life of Kerouac to date. It’s been selected by both Biography magazine and Vanity Fair for their “Hot Lists” and has received endorsements from the Kerouac Estate, composer David Amram (author of “Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac”),  Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. Historian and journalist Douglas Brinkley (Rosa Parks; The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey beyond the White House; and American Heritage”s History of the United States) has publicly praised the groundbreaking scholarship conducted by Maher.

Burning Furiously Beautiful will be published this year.  Stay tuned for more information!

 

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