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Summary
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.
Reviews (4)
Kirkus Review
A stunningly rich set of letters that at times reads like a new Kerouac novel. The ground covered here will not be new to those who have read Charters's biography of the writer (Jack Kerouac: A Life, not reviewed), but the sheer pleasure of hearing Kerouac's voice in this correspondence makes it well worth reading. The letters cover the years from Kerouac's college days at Columbia (194044) through 1956, when On the Road was published; it was the period in which he produced most of works that later made him famous. Through his correspondence with his mother, sister, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs, and others, we see the young writer's reactions to his circumstances and the growth of his self- understanding as a literary artist. The long letters back and forth between Kerouac and Ginsberg offer a valuable reminder that these revolutionary stylists were also deeply traditional in their belief that study of those who had preceded them was essential: They read, reread, discussed, dissected, and sometimes revered writers ranging from Percy Bysshe Shelley to Thomas Wolfe. Burroughs appears larger than life as he both engages and eludes his peers in the generation that would redefine American literature. The near-constant flow of family communication is perhaps even more delightful, as the young artist reports on his wild travels to his doting mother and loving sister. Selections describing events that show up later in the novels--Kerouac's first meetings with Neal and Carolyn Cassady in Denver, promiscuous indulgences in Mexico, long cross-country road trips, dissipations in New York City--will be irresistible to fans of Jack and the Beats. Throughout, Kerouac comes across as a sincere and honest soul who was fiercely devoted to friends, family, and the search for passionate experience and art. Its value for scholars shouldn't obscure this terrific volume's broader appeal.
Booklist Review
The publication of the first collection of Kerouac's letters and the first Kerouac reader may well inspire a reconsideration of Kerouac's complex, intensely confessional, and innovatively lyrical oeuvre. Ann Charters, Kerouac's biographer and editor of these important new volumes, provides succinct and illuminating analyses of the man and his writings. When Charters met Kerouac, she was amazed at his meticulous records, a tidy archive that yielded the gems she chose for inclusion in Selected Letters. During the 16 years covered by this torrent of correspondence, Kerouac enrolled in and dropped out of college, joined the merchant marines only to discover he couldn't handle military life, held a series of no-brain jobs, took road trips, married twice and fathered children, lived off his mother, befriended the writers we now refer to as the Beats, got high, listened to jazz, and wrote his first three novels. He describes all this and more in breathless letters to family members and friends, such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Malcolm Cowley, Alfred Kazin, and Gary Snyder. The most arresting letters, however, are to Neal Cassady, who ignited Kerouac's imagination. These letters became, as Charters writes, "the foundation for all Kerouac's subsequent books." Lengthy and impassioned, they are quintessentially American in their romanticism, poetic grandeur, loneliness, and tormented self-absorption and enable us to look directly into the fractured soul of an artist both blessed and cursed by his need to write.The Portable Jack Kerouac confirms all that the letters promise. Charters has chosen selections from each of Kerouac's 14 novels, which comprise a complex and evocative autobiographical series Kerouac called the Legend of Duluoz. In her fine introduction, Charters describes Kerouac's style, which he called "spontaneous prose," as a blend of memory, "present dream, and active reflection." Charters has also included poetry from San Francisco Blues and Book of Haikus, as well as a group of essays that cover Kerouac's main passions and interests: writing, traveling, jazz, and Buddhism. --Donna Seaman
Choice Review
For this volume, Charters--Kerouac's premier biographer (Kerouac, CH, Jul'73) and bibliographer--selected and edited nearly half of the author's voluminous correspondence from his precelebrity years. Kerouac was at work on a good deal of his "true story" spontaneous fiction during this period--before On the Road (1957) catapulted him to fame and infamy--and these letters are a wrenching account of a frustrated and prolific experimental writer who collected rejection slips for the six years following his first conventional novel, The Town and the City (1950). Since telephone calls were beyond his means, Kerouac produced a constant flow of words on paper to his Beat friends. Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Carolyn and Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder, John Clellon Holmes, his boyhood friends in Lowell, Massachusetts--all kept the words flowing, even when they were a continent or oceans apart. The touching correspondence with critics Malcolm Cowley and Alfred Kazin, editor Robert Giroux, and his Columbia professor Mark Van Doren were his tenuous contacts with the establishment during these frantic years. Charters (Univ. of Connecticut), who also edited the The Portable Beat Reader (1992) and The Portable Jack Kerouac (1995), made two very wise decisions here: she supplied continuity and context for the letters, and she included significant letters from the correspondents. The frustration of the long-rejected writer is doubly felt by the reader, since this selection ends on the eve of the big Beat breakthrough. All collections. K. N. Richwine; emeritus, Western Maryland College
Library Journal Review
These letters, addressed to the likes of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and publisher Robert Giroux, take Kerouac from his early years up to the publication of On the Road. Published in conjunction with The Portable Kerouac (ISBN 0-670-84957-X. $27). (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.