Dennis McNally Revisits Highway 61 (and Beyond)

Thirty-five years ago, a young American History PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst converted his dissertation on Jack Kerouac into the book, Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, and America. Almost immediately, the biography became widely praised as a landmark Kerouac work -- not just for its historical precision -- but because, for the first time, readers could understand this iconic, central and, at times, polarizing literary figure in a broader American cultu...