The Unknown Kerouac (LOA #283): Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings (Library of America Jack Kerouac Edition) - Hardcover

Kerouac, Jack

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 159853498X ISBN 13: 9781598534986

Publisher: Library of America, 2016

Synopsis

This remarkable gathering of previously unpublished writings shines new light on the On the Road author’s life, from his French Canadian childhood to his meteoric rise to literary fame

Edited and published with unprecedented access to the Kerouac archives, The Unknown Kerouac presents two lost novels, The Night Is My Woman and Old Bull in the Bowery, which Kerouac wrote in French during the especially fruitful years of 1951 and 1952. Discovered among his papers in the mid-nineties, they have been translated into English for the first time by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, who incorporates Kerouac’s own partial translations.

Also included are two journals from the heart of this same crucial period. In Private Philologies, Riddles, and a Ten-Day Writing Log, Kerouac recounts a brief stay in Denver—where he works on an early version of On the Road, reads dime novels, and even rides in a rodeo—and shows him contemplating writers like Chaucer and Joyce and playing with riddles and etymologies. Journal 1951, begun during a stay in a Bronx VA hospital, charts, in ecstatic, moving, and self-revealing pages, the wave of insights and breakthroughs that led Kerouac to the most singular transformation of American prose style since Hemingway.

This landmark volume is rounded out with the memoir Memory Babe, a poignant evocation of childhood play and reverie in a robust immigrant community, in which Kerouac uncannily retrieves and distills the subtlest sense impressions. And finally, in an interview with his longtime friend and fellow Beat John Clellon Holmes and in the late fragment Beat Spotlight Kerouac reflects on his meteoric career and unlooked for celebrity.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

About this title

About the Author

Todd Tietchen, editor, is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He edited Jack Kerouac’s The Haunted Life and Other Writings (2014) and the Library of America volume Kerouac: Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur (2015). Jean-Christophe Cloutier, translator, is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He edited La vie est d’hommage (2016), a comprehensive volume of Kerouac’s original French writings.

Edition details

• Publisher: Library of America
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 159853498X
• ISBN 13: 9781598534986
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 504
• Editor: Tietchen Todd