Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac edited by Douglas Brinkley. New York: Viking Press, 2004. $25.95 — 387 pp.

Between 1947 and 1954, Jack Kerouac kept an astonishing number of journals, notebooks and dairies. The young writer acknowledged that he had an obsessive need to record every aspect of his life. Many of his entries resemble a kind of “literary bookkeeping” (Kerouac wrote in railroad logs) in which he painstakingly lists the number of words he had written on the previous night (“I wrote 1,500 words for the funeral scene in The Town and the City.”).

In addition, he provides a running commentary on his social life. (“I got drunk with Artie Shaw last night and ate dinner at Allen Ginsburg’s apartment.”)

In Windblown World, Douglas Brinkley has arranged Kerouac’s journals in chronological order and occasionally reproduces significant pages, including Jack’s doodles and perverse rants. Certainly, there is much here that provides additional insights into Kerouac’s personality. However, there is much that serves little discernible purpose other than to reveal the young writer’s frustration and immaturity. Brinkley makes no attempt to separate the seed from the chaff.

Perhaps the most significant revelations consist of information that indicates Kerouac did not produce entire novels in a kind of non-stop manic ecstasy, with no need for editing or revision. In actual fact, the author spent months rewriting and revising the manuscript of The Town and the City, only to have the work subjected to additional revisions by his editor at Harcourt Brace.

In addition, Windblown World reveals young Kerouac’s significant debt to Thomas Wolfe. The Town and the Country, like Look Homeward, Angel, is a sprawling, autobiographical epic (originally more than 1,000 pages) filled with poetic passages about loneliness and death. Although Wolfe’s influence diminishes as Kerouac matures, his journals indicate that “the king of beat” felt a profound kinship with the North Carolina writer — especially in regard to his “window on the world” approach to writing.

However, Kerouac readily acknowledges Wolfe’s influence and notes that, like Wolfe, he was always a “putter inner” (amending and adding material) rather than a “taker-outer” (like Fitzgerald and Hemingway). Occasionally, the journals are confusing since they describe the author’s ambiguous response to undefined personal problems. Kerouac has little to say about his brief marriage, or the details of his indirect involvement in a murder. Pages are spent on his plans to move his family to Colorado, yet the actual move and the subsequent return to Ozone Park in Lowell, Mass., are not described. Ironically, all of these events are covered in Kerouac’s novels. This fact suggests that the journals are best understood if they are read in conjunction with Kerouac’s novels (The Town and the City and On the Road).

One of the journals, labeled “Rain and Rivers,” proves to be a poetic description of Kerouac’s travels. Unlike the other journals, this short work has a musical quality that soars, rushes and glides like water and wind. Based on the author’s exploration of America, from Rocky Mount, North Carolina (near where Jack’s sister lived), through Georgia and Louisiana, up the coast of California to Spokane and then into the Midwest, Kerouac gives a vibrant description of American rivers, storms and darkness.

Traveling in boxcars, buses, borrowed cars and frequent walking/hitch-hiking jaunts, Kerouac and Neal Cassady experience an America that may be forever lost. These passages capture the immensity and grandeur of this country in the 1950s. Indeed, the strange rhapsody of “Rain and Rivers,” with its catalogues of names and places, is a gratifying discovery.

Windblown World is an uneven collection of prosaic facts, occasional insights and a singular, remarkable small work (“Rain and Rivers”). Yet, scattered throughout these journals are passages that provide us with glimpses of Kerouac in his vulnerable youth — a young man given to lone walks through the night streets of Lowell, brooding about lost loves, God’s absence and his own genius — a young man searching for epiphanies.

(Gary Carden is a writer who lives in Sylva. He can be reached at gcarden498@aol.com)