Kerouac: Selected Letters
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In his prolific correspondence Jack Kerouac set down the raw material of the life that he would later transmute into his multi-volume "Legend of Duluoz". He also refined the seemingly freewheeling and spontaneous prose style that became his trademark. This volume contains many letters written between 1940, when Kerouac was a college freshman and 1956, immediately before his leap to celebrity status. They offer invaluable insights into Kerouac's family life, friendships, travels, love affairs and literary apprenticeship, and provide accounts of the events that inspired "On the Road", "Visions of Cody" and "The Dharma Burns".
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.