Through publishers stopped Maggie Cassidy's Jack Dulouz and On the Road's Sal Paradise form sharing the same name, Kerouac meant the books to be two parts of the same life.

While On the Road made Paradise (and Kerouac) a hero of the disaffected and restless for generations to come, Maggie Cassidy is an affectionate portrait of the teenager that made the man - of friendship and first love - growing up in a New England mill town.

Dulouz is a high school athletics and football star who meet Maggie Cassidy and begins a devoted, inconstant, tender adolescent love affair. It is one of the most sustained, poetic pieces of Kerouac's 'spontaneous prose'.

"A very unique cat-a French-Canadian Hinayana Buddhist Beat Catholic savant" Allen Ginsberg