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Nov 01, 2000 | ISBN 9780140296150 Buy
Mar 01, 1996 | ISBN 9780140234442 Buy
Also available from:
Nov 01, 2000 | ISBN 9780140296150
Mar 01, 1996 | ISBN 9780140234442
The first volume of Jack Kerouac’s selected letters, published in 1995, was hailed as an important and revealing addition to Kerouac scholarship. This second and final volume, comprising letters written between 1957, the year On the Road was published, and the day before his death in 1969 at age forty-seven, tells Kerouac’s life story through his candid correspondence with friends, confidants, and editors—among them Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Philip Whalen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joyce Johnson, and Malcolm Cowley. Documenting his continuing development as a writer and his travels, love affairs, and complicated family life, the letters also reveal Kerouac’s amazing courage in the force of criticism and his never-ending quest to be the best writer possible.
Jack Kerouac Selected Letters 1957-1969 offers unparalleled insight into the life and mind of this giant of the American landscape.
It was in his letters that Jack Kerouac set down the raw material that he transmuted into his novels, exploring and refining the spontaneous prose style that became his trademark. The letters in this volume, written between 1940, when Kerouac was a freshman at college, and 1956, immediately before his breathless leap into celebrity with the publication of On the Road, offer invaluable insights into Kerouac’s family life, his friendships with Neal and Carolyn Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and William S. Burroughs, his travels, love affairs, and literary apprenticeship. At once fascinating reading and a major addition to Kerouac scholarship, here is a rare portrait of the writer as a young adventurer of immense talent, energy, and ambition in the midst of writing and living an American legend.
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), the central figure of the Beat Generation, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922 and died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969. Among his many novels are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Visions of Cody.
“Reveals the boldness and originality of Kerouac’s artistic vision.” —The Boston Globe
“It remains clear from his later letters that Kerouac understood what he was doing as a writer. He consistently explains his aesthetic, his plan to create the Duluoz Legend of books, and the essentially benign charity of his vision.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Rambunctious and energetic . . . the letters convey the genius of that special American type—the perpetual motion man.” —The Washington Post
“Kerouac’s letters and early stories supplement his legend, providing a fuller portrait of a true American original.” —The Boston Globe
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