Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters: Volume 2

When Viking published the first volume of Jack Kerouac's letters in 1995, it was considered a major addition to Kerouac scholarship. The early correspondence portended the uninhibited and spontaneous prose style that would later become the author's trademark. In the second and final volume of this life-in-letters, Ann Charters, renowned Kerouac biographer and editor of The Portable Jack Kerouac, features selected letters that illuminate the latter years of this inimitable writer--the years of fame, alcohol, and disillusionment.

Written between 1957, the year of the publication of On the Road, and two days before his death in 1969 at the age of forty-seven, Kerouac's letters tell his own story through his candid and voluminous correspondence to friends and confidants--from Malcolm Cowley, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder to Joyce Johnson, John Clellon Holmes and Sterling Lord. In his letters, Kerouac explores his development as a writer, as well as revealing how the onslaught of publicity and criticism after the publication of On the Road in 1957 nearly destroyed him. Offering unparalleled insights into the mind and life of a giant of the American literary landscape, Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1957-1969 is a major addition to the understanding of the artist and his work.