"While a legend has developed about the man Jack Kerouac, there has not been a thorough study of what he wrote. This is the first book to explore his place in American literature by establishing the total design of his work. Regina Weinreich contends that Kerouac wrote with a "grand design" in mind: that he thought of his works as "one vast book: a "Divine Comedy of Buddha" that he called The Legend of Duluoz.".

"The nature of Kerouac's "spontaneous bop prosody" is discussed in relation to the work of Thomas Wolfe and Henry Miller. Kerouac compared his "loose style" to that of a jazz horn-player sounding one long note. Moving beyond Kerouac's method alone, Weinreich seeks further to define the unity of his works, from The Town and the City, On the Road, and Visions of Cody to Desolation Angels and Vanity of Duluoz, which she argues brings the legend full circle."--BOOK JACKET.