Memory Babe

Book excerpt: When MEMORY BABE first appeared from Grove Press in 1983, LIBRARY JOURNAL wrote: "To call this book the definitive Kerouac biography is an understatement ... [it is] all-inclusive and richly detailed. The reader's immersion in Kerouac's thoughts, moves, and mess-ups is so total that one cannot but feel a great empathy for him ...." USA TODAY wrote: "MEMORY BABE is the most relentlessly and thoroughly researched of the Kerouac biographies ... There is a day-to-day tracing of Kerouac's thoughts and movements astonishing in its exactitude." In the new, revised and updated version, Gerald Nicosia builds on his landmark text, using a wide range of sources that have only become available in the past quarter century, since the book was last published by University of California Press in 1994. The new edition contains hundreds of changes from the last edition. Some of these are merely corrections, a name or date changed, but there are also extensive new passages based on material that has come to light since 1994. As just some examples, the book contains new material on Kerouac's ancestry; on his relationship with his mother and his last wife Stella Sampas; on some of his dark sides, such as his anti-Semitism; on the ways Kerouac was influenced by Neal Cassady's infamous "Joan Anderson Letter"; on what Kerouac wished for and saw as his legacy; and on the details of his death. Nicosia also tries to define more precisely Kerouac's role in pioneering the postmodern novel. MEMORY BABE is still the only critical biography of Kerouac--still the only book that examines in detail his literary output and attempts to analyze just what his literary innovations and achievements were. This new, revised and updated version is an even more accurate and comprehensive look at the Father of the Beat Generation, his life, his oeuvre, and his legacy.