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Kerouac: Selected Letters: Volume 1: 1940-1956
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Kerouac: Selected Letters: Volume 1: 1940-1956 Paperback - 1996

by Jack Kerouac; Introduction by Ann Charters

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The life and craft of Jack Kerouac are traced through some of his most personal and mesmerizing letters. Written between 1940, when he was a freshman in college, and 1956, immediately before his leap into celebrity with the publication of On the Road, these letters offer valuable insights into Kerouac's family life, friendships with Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, and others.

Summary

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.

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From the publisher

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.

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Details

  • Title Kerouac: Selected Letters: Volume 1: 1940-1956
  • Author Jack Kerouac; Introduction by Ann Charters
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition First Thus
  • Pages 656
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Penguin Books, New York, NY, U.S.A.
  • Publication date 1996-03-01
  • ISBN 9780140234442 / 0140234446
  • Weight 1.14 lbs (0.52 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.11 x 4.86 x 1.43 in (20.60 x 12.34 x 3.63 cm)
  • Age range 18 to UP years
  • Grade levels 13 - UP
  • Category Biography / Autobiography
  • Library of Congress subjects Beat generation, Authors, American - 20th century -
  • Library of Congress Catalogue Number 94012911
  • Dewey Decimal Code B

Media reviews

"The most exhilirating book of the year."
—Chicago Tribune

"As we just now begin to map full 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

"The greatest addition to the Kerouac canon in recent years"
—Steven Moore, Review of contemporary Fiction

"To have [his letters] gathered in one place . . . is to be overwhelmed by his passion for the printed word, by his hunger for experience and by his ability to describe both in language that sings. . . . The most exhilirating book of the year."
—Thomas McGonigle, Chicago Tribune

Citations

  • New York Times, 03/24/1996, Page 28
  • Publishers Weekly, 01/15/1996, Page 0

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.
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Selected Letters, 1940-1956
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