Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

THE DULUOZ LEGEND

 

 

 

POETRY

 

 

 

OTHER WORK

 

The Town and the City
The Scripture of the Golden Eternity
Some of the Dharma
Old Angel Midnight
Good Blonde & Others
Pull My Daisy
Trip Trap
(with Albert Saijo and
Lew Welch)
Pic
The Portable Jack Kerouac
Selected Letters: 1940-1956
Selected Letters: 1957-1969
Atop an Underwood: Early Stories
and Other Writings
Door Wide Open
(with Joyce
Johnson)
Orpheus Emerged
Departed Angels: The Lost Paintings
Windblown World: Journals
1947-1954
Beat Generation: A Play
On the Road: The Original Scroll
Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha
You're a Genius All the Time: Belief
and Technique for Modern Prose
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their
Tanks
(with William S. Burroughs)

 

POETRY

 

 

 

PROSE AND PHOTOGRAPHY

 

Allen Ginsberg Photographs
Allen Verbatim
As Ever
(with Neal Cassady)
The Book of Martyrdom & Artifice:
First Journals and Poems 1937-1952
Composed on the Tongue
Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays
1952-1995
Family Business: Selected Letters
Between a Father & Son
(with Louis Ginsberg)
Indian Journals
Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties
Journals: Mid-Fifties: 1954-1958
The Letters of Allen Ginsberg
The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg
and Gary Snyder
Snapshot Poetics
Spontaneous Mind: Selected
Interviews, 1958-1996
Straight Hearts' Delight
(with Peter Orlovsky)
The Yage Letters
(with William S. Burroughs)

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

Copyright © John Sampas, Literary Representative of the Estate of Jack Kerouac, 2010 Copyright © The Allen Ginsberg Trust, 2010

Introduction copyright © Bill Morgan and David Stanford, 2010
All rights reserved

 

Frontispiece of letter from Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg: Allen Ginsberg Papers, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Frontispiece of letter from Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969.

[Correspondence. Selections]

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg : the letters / edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford.

p. cm.

Includes index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-43713-1

1. Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969—Correspondence. 2. Ginsberg, Allen, 1926-1997—Correspondence. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Correspondence. 4. Beat generation. I. Morgan, Bill, 1949- II. Stanford, David, 1951- III. Ginsberg, Allen, 1926-1997. Correspondence. Selections. IV. Title.

PS3521.E735Z48 2010

813'.54—dc22

[B] 2010003213

 

 

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The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

I've all these two days spent filing old letters, taking them out of old envelopes, clipping the pages together, putting them away . . . hundreds of old letters from Allen, Burroughs, Cassady, enuf to make you cry the enthusiasms of younger men . . . how bleak we become. And fame kills all. Someday “The Letters of Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac” will make America cry.

—Jack Kerouac, in a letter to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, May 25, 1961

“Let you not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments—love is not love which alters when it altercation finds—O no! 'tis an ever fix'd lark.”

—The twenty-two-year-old Jack Kerouac paraphrasing William Shakespeare in his first letter to the seventeen-year-old Allen Ginsberg

 

 

It is now common to lament the gradual demise of the handwritten or hand-typed letter over the past decades. Significant blame is often placed, and rightly so, on the radical lowering of phone rates. Up through the mid-1960s, for many people calling long-distance across country was a rare and costly luxury, only to be indulged in for an emergency or to share news of a birth or death. But as technology improved, people could increasingly afford to pick up the telephone and talk through the details of their lives with friends and loved ones, instead of taking the time to sit down and write. More recently, the advent of e-mail has further diminished the flow of snail mail correspondence.

The question now becomes whether writers who prove to be of lasting interest, and who correspond extensively about their lives and their craft via e-mail, will take the trouble to maintain accessible records for use by future scholars and readers. But whatever lies ahead in this regard, it is unlikely we will often see a body of correspondence between two important writers that yields more insight into their work and their lives than does the collection of letters and postcards between Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Their prodigious output is remarkable enough merely for its sheer volume and for the longevity of the literary friendship enacted and developed through it. But it is truly extraordinary in its range, quality, and intimacy. An extended correspondence of such richness is a rare thing.