Kerouac Jack

1957 · réf. 130826 — 1957. First Edition. KEROUAC Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking 1957. Octavo original black cloth original dust jacket. Housed in a custom clamshell box. $12000.First edition of Kerouac's second and most important novel ""a physical and metaphysical journey across America"" in colorful original dust jacket.""Between 1947 and 1950 Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac took off on a freewheeling journey through the USA and Mexico in search of something outside their domestic experience. Ten years later their adventures were related in On the Road… The novel's composition has become a well-known anecdote in its own right. Returning home from his wanderings Kerouac spent almost a year pondering how specifically in what form he might convey the life he had been living. Several false starts were made but in April 1951 he fed a 120-foot roll of teletype into his typewriter typed for three weeks and the result largely unrevised was On the Road"" Parker 339. ""Just before Jack Kerouac died in 1969 he told Neal Cassady that he feared he would die like Melville unknown and unappreciated in his own time… On the Road has become a classic of the Beat Movement with its stream-of-consciousness depiction of the rejection of mainstream American values set in a physical and metaphysical journey across America"" Book in America 136. Bruccoli & Clark I:217. Bookplate.Book fine bright dust jacket with a bit of chipping to spine ends a few short closed tears to bottom edge creasing along flap folds. A near-fine copy. hardcover