Kerouac: Selected Letters: Volume 1: 1940-1956

An "exhilarating" (Chicago Tribune) selection of Jack Kerouac's most personal, truthful, and mesmerizing letters that trace his life and craft--edited by Ann Charters

"As we just now begin to map fully the fallout of [the Beat Generation's] creative explosion, these letters offer an invaluable blueprint to the intricate, high-yield ballistics that went into creating it."--San Francisco Examiner

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 apprenticeships.

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.

Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 03/01/1996
Pages: 656
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.14lbs
Size: 8.11h x 4.86w x 1.43d
ISBN: 9780140234442
Audience: Young Adult


Review Citation(s):
New York Times 03/24/1996 pg. 28
Publishers Weekly 01/15/1996

About the Author
Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the "Beat generation" and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of "one vast book," The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.