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Kerouac’s bibliography is a strange one. After the incredible success of his novel On the Road the market was suddenly flooded with new Kerouac publications. Most of these had been written before his sudden fame and rejected previously. They have the feel of posthumous publications, even though the author was still alive when they were published.

His good friend Allen Ginsberg mentions several books in his dedication to his poem Howl, published a year before On the Road:

‘Jack Kerouac, new Buddha of American prose, who spit forth intelligence in eleven books written in half the number of years (1951-156) – On the Road, Visions of Neal, Dr. Sax, Springtime Mary, The Subterraneans, San Francisco Blues, Some of the Dharma, Book of Dreams, Wake Up, Mexico City Blues, and Visions of Gerard.’

All of these found their way into print when Kerouac suddenly became hot property.

Kerouac’s UK publisher, André Deutsch, couldn’t quite keep up with this flow of publications, it seems, or maybe the demand wasn’t as high as in Kerouac’s native country. The novellas Tristessa and Visions of Gerard, published separately in the USA, were published as one book. It was a good move: the two novellas complement each other well and this unique publication is now much sought-after.

Visions of Gerard is a portrait of Kerouac’s saintly older brother who died at the age of nine after a life disabling illness. Tristessa is about his friendship with a sex worker and the destructive nature of her addiction. Buddhist thought plays a role in both novellas. Both are love stories, with the loved ones doomed and Kerouac sadly accepting the inevitable ending.

The Subterreneans was published as a film tie-in with actress Leslie Caron on the cover. The Subtereneans is explicitly about a black woman and an interracial relationship. It seems obscene now that the black love interest was played by a white actress and that Kerouac allowed his powerful and bravely honest novella to be changed in that way.

Kerouac initially published his first novel The Town and the City under the name John Kerouac and it does seem at times like it was written by someone else. The novel starts off quite traditionally in the vein of Tom Wolfe, but Kerouac seems to be finding his own style while writing it and by the end he turns from the unknown John Kerouac into the Jack Kerouac we know. A much underrated novel!

The book didn’t do much critically or commercially and Kerouac had to wait another six years and many rejections to have his next novel published: this of course was On the Road… As said, after this they just kept on coming.

‘After this I’ll shut up,’ he writes in one of his last novels Satori in Paris. (Not a previous reject, but a fresh new work: a whole 118 pages!) It reads like a drunk’s rant and you get the feeling that Kerouac is painfully spiraling out of control here. (It should really have been titled ‘A Drunkard in Paris’.) How did Kerouac get to this place only a decade after the exuberance of On the Road?

Kerouac did shut up soon after the publication of Satori in Paris: he died in 1969 at the age of 47.

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Kerouac is a Quinto favorite: we usually have several of his publications in stock. If you type his name into the search box you will see the books that are currently available.