Selections from Jack Kerouac’s journals of the late 1940s and early 1950s—the raw material for what became his classic novel On the Road, edited and with an introduction by Douglas Brinkley “A story of self-invention, perseverance, and breakthrough . . . What Kerouac wanted most, these journals reveal, was to dig down into the dark American earth . . . and turn up his own rich shovelful of truth.”—The New York Times Book Review “These Kerouac journals remind me of a time, not all that long ago, when there were still a few people passionately responsive to writing. They are now extinct.”—Kurt Vonnegut Jack Kerouac is best known through the image he put forth in his autobiographical novels. Yet it is only his private journals, in which he set down the raw material of his life and thinking, that reveal to us the real Kerouac. In Windblown World, distinguished Americanist Douglas Brinkley has gathered a selection of journal entries from the most pivotal period of Kerouac’s life, 1947 to 1954. Here is Kerouac as a hungry young writer finishing his first novel while forging crucial friendships with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Truly a self-portrait of the artist as a young man, this unique and indispensable volume is an integral element of the Beat oeuvre.