For a counter culture hero, Jack Kerouac maintains a surprising level of idealism, patriotism, and innocence. He lambastes New Yorkers for always looking to Europe for their cultural and political heroes and instead prefers to look westward across America. This anger was a result of the lack of interest by New Yorkers over a newspaper article claiming that Jesse James was still alive. Kerouac was excited by the tangible link in 1940's America to the America of the legendary old west. Lowell, Kerouac's hometown, becomes the ideal American city for him which he uses as a benchmark against all other locales. Kerouac's journals are probably the only place you will find San Francisco and a small town in North Dakota both praised for being like Lowell, Massachusetts. Although he later practices Buddhist teachings, Kerouac is a fairly conventional practitioner of Catholicism who attended Mass and confession regularly and often contemplated Catholic theology.
The second half of Windblown World is a collection of Kerouac's travel journals used as source material for On the Road. Surprisingly this portion of the collected work is much less interesting as it provides little insight into Kerouac. The travel journals are much like any traveler's journal and mostly just provide short notes on the people and places encountered while traveling. It is interesting though to recognize journal entries that are the basis for much more elaborate retellings in On the Road.
The most intriguing part of the second half of the work is the journal entries related to Kerouac's attempts to write On the Road. While he easily wrote several thousand words a night while creating The Town and the City, he struggles to write even a few hundred words he is happy with for On the Road. In fact, Kerouac spends more than a year struggling to find a rhythm to beginning On the Road. This shatters the myth that Kerouac sat down and wrote On the Road in a matter of weeks. Instead, he spent a great deal of time in planning both the content and style of the novel.
The most intriguing part of the second half of the work is the journal entries related to Kerouac's attempts to write On the Road. While he easily wrote several thousand words a night while creating The Town and the City, he struggles to write even a few hundred words he is happy with for On the Road. In fact, Kerouac spends more than a year struggling to find a rhythm to beginning On the Road. This shatters the myth that Kerouac sat down and wrote On the Road in a matter of weeks. Instead, he spent a great deal of time in planning both the content and style of the novel.
Douglas Brinkley does a superb job of editing Jack Kerouac's journals. The journal entries he selected and the editorial clean-up allow Windblown World to flow smoothly. The reader gets a genuine sense of Kerouac's thought process and emotions during the time period covered by the journals. Windblown World provides the casual Jack Kerouac fan with a true sense of Jack Kerouac the man as opposed to the myth he created for himself in his novels.
