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1 p. 4to. An unpublished letter from Kerouac to Giroux that opens with his query about the status of poet Phillip Whalen's book, stating that Whalen was ".wondering what you're doing with his Collected Poems manuscript. If you can't publish them, would you mail them back to him (since you have all the paraphenalia [sic] of stamp meters & such?). .I know you enjoyed them if you read them." He includes Whalen's San Francisco address. Kerouac goes on to mention various ongoing short projects of his own, from "Try to get the new Evergreen Review #31, on page 108 my contribution to the legal definition of 'salaciousness' in letters," to "Sold a short story, 'Good Blonde,' to Playboy magazine. And now am being asked to write about Shakespeare for Show Magazine." He then commences on a long, characteristically digressive, stream-of-consciousness description of his longer manuscript, which five years later would become the semi-autobiograpical novel Vanity of Duluoz: "As for new novel about 1938-1946, Duluoz the football star is reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica and the New York Times in the Lowell High School sunny morning library.dreaming not only of New York but of Tristan the Sad. When I say 'Tristan the Sad' I mean an actual vision I always had then of distant mist, of somehow horses, or Indians, on the pine horizons of New Hampshire, or Hampshire, or Cornwall, then comes your briney foam itself of the sea, but nothing as corny as that.," adding, "not started actually but time is on my side since my only disease is heartburn." Kerouac had actually started working on this story in 1942, and it would be the last book published in his lifetime. Kerouac continues, mentioning Neal Cassady, his recent reading ('Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,' 'Tristan and Iseult,' and Norman Mailer's 'Papers'), and that he was studying a German dictionary, as "a Berlin film producer Hansjurgen Pohland wants me to go to Berlin to make a movie." He concludes with, "Am writing to you on teletype paper I use for novels, not started yet. If you can come out here some time, I would like you to take back a one thousand page religious-philosophical tome 'Some of the Dharma' just to read, if you want." Besides his agent, Sterling Lord, Giroux was Kerouac's closest friend in the world of commercial publishing, having published Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City, after a recommendation from Mark Van Doren, a mutual friend from Columbia. Their relationship experienced a rough patch after Giroux deemed the On The Road scroll as unpublishable, but was later very enthusiastic about Doctor Sax, and Kerouac apologized for his past treatment, thanking Giroux afterward for his effectiveness in getting Kerouac work published. Whalen's Collected Poems was eventually published by Wesleyan University Press in 2007. Brown paper torn from teletype roll, tanned and chipped along one edge; recto only.
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