Book summary

This highly autobiographical work, set at a very Columbia-like university, was written in 1945, when Kerouac was 23.

Media reviews

"Even accounting for the age of its author [23], this book is an appallingly bad one. It is not poor in the standard manner of books written by young authors who go on to achieve some measure of success, that is, generally uninspired writing but containing the odd flash that signals the artist that is to come....The writing in ORPHEUS EMERGED, rather, contains no hint of Kerouac's signature impressionism that defenestrated the prevailing literary conventions. The novel is strikingly conventional, plagued by the stilted prose typical of budding fiction writers."