My first “book as Bible” was Jack Kerouac’sOn the Road. I once donated a hardcover copy—soon stolen, I imagine—to the reading room of Shakespeare & Company, George Whitman’s Paris bookstore, in the belief that I was evangelizing for some sort of poetic truth and a vagabond way of life. Kerouac’s 1956 summer as a fire lookout in the North Cascades formed the basis of two later books, The Dharma Bums (1958) and Desolation Angels (1965).