Found: letter that put Jack Kerouac on the road to literary greatness
Once thought lost for ever, correspondence that inspired the Beat Generation is now up for sale
It's been called the letter that launched a literary genre - 16,000 amphetamine-fuelled, stream-of-consciousness words written by Neal Cassady to his friend Jack Kerouac in 1950.
Upon reading them, Kerouac scrapped an early draft of On The Road and, during a three-week writing binge, revised his novel into a style similar to Cassady's, one that would become known as Beat literature.
The letter, Kerouac said shortly before his death, would have transformed his counterculture muse Cassady into a towering literary figure, if only it hadn't been lost.
Turns out it wasn't, says Joe Maddalena, whose Southern California auction house Profiles in History is putting the letter up for sale on December 17. It was just misplaced, for 60-some years.
It is being offered as part of a collection that includes papers by E.E. Cummings, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Penn Warren and other prominent literary figures. But Maddalena believes the item bidders will want most is Cassady's 18-page, single-spaced screed describing a drunken, sexually charged, sometimes comical visit to his hometown of Denver.
"It's the seminal piece of literature of the Beat Generation, and there are so many rumours and speculation of what happened to it," Maddalena said.