This remarkable gathering of previously unpublished writings shines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.
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