Poetic, poignant and clever, "What Happened Later" is a unique and engaging story of two lives that were forever changed by one book. In 1967, only ten years after the sensational success of ON THE ROAD, Jack Kerouac was a physically broken, spiritually lost man. Fifteen years later, after falling under the spell of the larger-than-life-myth of Jack Kerouac, a working-class, small-town Ontario teenager named Ray Robertson embarked upon his own quest--to own a copy of ON THE ROAD. Rebuffed at every turn in his attempt to possess the elusive novel, Robertson nonetheless slowly begins to recognize the existence of a world beyond the factories, hockey rinks and suburbs of his hometown, and also begins to comprehend his own French-Canadian heritage. Taking its title from Kerouac himself--"What Happened Later" was the title of his proposed sequel to ON THE ROAD--this novel tells the story of what happened after the fame generated by Kerouac''s famous book and what happened next in the life of a young man infatuated with the legendary author. Interweaving the story of one author''s slow decline with one boy''s literary coming of age, "What Happened Later" explores the ever-shifting dualities of myth and reality, loss and hope, innocence and experience, endings and beginnings.