BIOGRAPHY IS A BITCH. An exercise akin to diagnosing the condition of a man's prostate, by examining his shadow on the wall. Attempting to put flesh on the skeletal remains of any individual; to resurrect them purely via research, anecdote, or reminiscence of now senile childhood friend, is a daunting task. More daunting still, if the subject is the inscrutable "King of the Beats."

I owe an apology to Paul Maher, Jr. I once categorized his exhaustingly comprehensive tome, "Kerouac: His Life and Work," as, "Just another run-of-the-mill Kerouac bio." I was wrong. During a recent respite, I had a chance to revisit Mr. Maher's absorbingly detailed, blunderbuss of a book: bearing it like the weight of a rucksack as I wandered the latte shops of Vegas -- in much the same way Sal Paradise wandered that great ribbon of highway, searching for "Satori" in "On the Road."

Though it lacks the first-hand recollections of Kerouac's editor, Ellis Amburn's bio, "The Subterranean Kerouac" (such as a drunken Kerouac threatening to shove a pineapple up his editor's ass), Maher's work is a painstaking attempt to summon forth the ghost of a man who remains one of the least understood, and most undervalued figures in twentieth century American literature. Maher covers more ground than the series of rides ("borrowed" and hitched) that slingshotted Kerouac and Cassady from coast to coast and back again: Their legendary road trips that set the framework for "On the Road;" the genesis of the Beat movement begun by Kerouac and fellow Columbia University student Allen Ginsberg (a movement exploited and corrupted by Hollywood and Madison Avenue in the guise of bongo-playing, free verse spouting "Beatniks").

From little "Ti Jean" Kerouac who as a youth was more fluent in "Joual" (the bastardized French spoken by his Canadian forebears), than the English he would one day bend and elongate like the riffs of a Coltrane Jazz solo; to the bitter reactionary who disavowed the very literary movement he served as catalyst for -- out of print, broke and seemingly eclipsed by fellow Beats Ginsberg and Burroughs.

Kerouac re-emerges as the groundbreaking prose stylist who sent cultural seismic waves rumbling across the white picket fence landscape of late-fifties America -- influencing not only a generation of writers to follow (such as Hunter S. Thompson), but the likes of Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan, who proclaimed, "Kerouac IS rock 'n' roll!" Kerouac: His Life and Work