Part of what drove Jack Kerouc’s celebration of the American natural and cultural landscape was his foreignness. Or so says Joyce Johnson, his biographer and former girlfriend, in “The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac." The beat-voiced writer was born in Massachusetts to French-Canadian parents whose strong sense of Québécois culture, Johnson holds, overrode their son’s hometown influences. Extra insight into Kerouac via Johnson can be found in "Door Wide Open," a collection of letters the two exchanged during their 22-month-long relationship. [via the Vancouver Sun]

Celebrity biographer and New York Post columnist Michael Starr will write Ringo Starr’s biography -- without the Beatle’s blessing. Ringo has officially distanced himself from the project: a short and sweet message on both his website and his Facebook page announce his utter non-participation in the writer Starr’s story: “It has nothing to do with me.” [via the Examiner]

A new biography of U.S. president number six presents a figure as intellectual as stately, a combination of traits not necessarily common today. In "John Quincy Adams," Harlow Giles Unger outlines the rise of a powerful mind -- as a teenager he served as French translator and diplomatic aid to his presidential father -- uniquely situated during the fledgling United States’ cultural evolution. Unger’s tale of “an irrevocably honest, tremendously well educated and an exemplary leader” is not only timely, but also powerfully gripping.  [via the Washington Times]

Soon, fans of How I Met Your Mother, Doogie Howser, M.D., and Dr. Horrible will have another thing in common. In addition to flocking to everything the singing, dancing, deadpanning Neil Patrick Harris does, they’ll all have spent time reading his new biography, due out spring 2014 by Random House imprint Crown Archetype. All we know now is that Harris will use those pages to share things like what it’s like to be a child star, how to get a leg up on Broadway, and the secrets of being a successful amateur magician in a book that will be, in the words of his publisher, “ an interactive, nonlinear reading experience that breaks the boundaries of conventional memoir.” [via the New York Times]

If the more people you meet, the more you like your dog, soon there’ll be a memoir for you to read, too. Uggie, the Jack Russell terrier silver-screen star of last year’s blockbuster The Artist, has finished penning his own tale -- with some handholding by author Wendy Holden -- and is sitting pretty until its release on October 16. We expect there’ll also be some inside scoop on The Descendants and Water for Elephants, two other films under Uggie’s collar. [via People magazine]