Kerouac: Selected Letters

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.

"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