themaninthegreenshirt:Neal Cassady’s Famous Lost Letter to Jack KerouacThe mythic, long-lost 1950 le
themaninthegreenshirt:Neal Cassady’s Famous Lost Letter to Jack KerouacThe mythic, long-lost 1950 letter that inspired Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” has been rescued from the dustbin of history — literally. The 16,000-word missive from his friend Neal Cassady that prompted Kerouac to toss his early drafts and rewrite the novel in a propulsive, stream-of-consciousness style has resurfaced in a trove of papers tossed by a now-defunct small press.It will be sold at auction on Dec. 17 by the southern California auction house Profiles in History.The full text of the 18-page, single-spaced letter, known as “the Joan Anderson letter,” has not been made available but about a third of which has previously been known from a retyped version. Kerouac once described it as “the greatest piece of writing I ever saw, better’n anybody in America, or at least enough to make Melville, Twain, Dreiser, Wolfe, I dunno who, spin in their graves.”The whereabouts of the letter, named for a girlfriend of Cassady’s mentioned in the letter, has long been a shaggy-dog footnote to Beat history. In a 1968 interview with The Paris Review, Kerouac said that Allen Ginsberg had lent it to a friend living on a houseboat, who dropped it overboard. In fact, Ginsberg, apparently seeking to have it published, mailed it to Golden Goose Press in San Francisco, where it went unopened. When the publisher closed, it planned to throw its unopened submissions in the trash. Instead, the files were brought home by the operator of a small music label who shared their offices, according to The A.P. After the label manager’s death, the letter was found by his daughter.According to Dennis McNally, a Kerouac biographer, the letter is “invaluable,” “It inspired Kerouac greatly in the direction he wanted to travel, which was this spontaneous style of writing contained in a letter that had just boiled out of Neal Cassady’s brain.” -- source link
#histories#i think