Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0743452550, Hardcover)

ORPHEUS EMERGED is the first full-length work of fiction to be published since Jack Kerouac's death over thirty years ago. This novella, completed in 1945 when Kerouac was 23, is about love and aesthetics, life versus art. Set in a large university, it follows the obsessions, passions, conflicts and dreams of a group of colorful, searching bohemian intellectuals and libertines. It was written shortly after Kerouac met Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr and others in and around Columbia University who would form the core of the Beats. The characters in ORPHEUS EMERGED are based on these new friends. The tale reveals Kerouac formulating the very ideas that defined the Beat Generation and is a unique portrait of an artist as a young man.

"ORPHEUS EMERGED did remind me of the earnestness of the beats."(Maureen Corrigan on NPR's FRESH AIR)