Desolation Angels, published in 1965, yet written years earlier around the time On the Road

On the Road

On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, written in April 1951, and published by Viking Press in 1957. It is a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. It is often considered a defining work of...

was in the process of publication, is a semi-autobiographical

Autobiography

An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...

 novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 written by Beat Generation

Beat generation

The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...

 author Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...

, which makes up part of his Duluoz Legend

Duluoz Legend

The Duluoz Legend is the name given by the American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac to the novels that constituted the major body of his work...

. According to the book's foreword, the opening section of the novel is almost directly taken from the journal he kept when he was a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade

North Cascades National Park

North Cascades National Park is a U.S. National Park located in the state of Washington. The park is the largest of the three National Park Service units that comprise the North Cascades National Park Service Complex. Several national wilderness areas and British Columbia parkland adjoin the...

 mountains of Washington state.