Skip content
Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale! Shop the sale
The Voice Is All by Joyce Johnson
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
IBD balloon logo

Shop the sale

In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!

Shop now

The Voice Is All

The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac

$23.61

Get for $14.99 with membership
Narrator Carrington MacDuffie

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Length 16 hours 49 minutes
Language English
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson—coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac—brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities.  Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she  tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road, followed by Visions of Cody. By illuminating Kerouac's early choice to sacrifice everything for his work, The Voice Is All deals with him on his own terms and puts the tragic contradictions of his nature and his complex relationships into perspective.

Joyce Johnson is the author of several books, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Minor Characters, Missing Men, and Door Wide Open, with Jack Kerouac. She has written for Vanity Fair and the New Yorker and lives in New York City.

Carrington MacDuffie is a voice actor, recording artist, poet, and spoken-word performer who has narrated over two hundred audiobooks, received numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has been a frequent finalist for the Audie Award, including for her original audiobook Many Things Invisible. In addition to her narration work, she has released an album of original songs entitled Only an Angel. She has recited and performed her poetry at venues ranging from L.A. coffeehouses to the museums and poetry festivals of the Northwest. She served for several years as poetry editor of the literary journal Square Lake, where she enjoyed discovering and publishing unknown writers alongside of literary notables.

IBD balloon logo

Shop the sale

In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!

Shop now

Reviews

"This is quite simply the best book about Kerouac and one of the best accounts of any writer's apprenticeship that I have read." ---Russell Banks Expand reviews
Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale! Shop the sale