Empty Mirror

a literary magazine

  • About
    • About Empty Mirror
    • Get in Touch
    • Support EM
    • Colophon
  • Submit
  • Contributors
  • Essays
  • On Literature
  • Poetry
  • Reviews
  • Art
  • Interviews
  • Beat
    • Beat Generation
    • Ted Joans Lives!
  • +
    • Fiction
    • Music & Film
    • News
    • On Writing
    • Book Collecting

Are There Any Good Unpublished Kerouac Books Left?

Paul Maher Jr.

Kerouac notebooks

With the glut of books that thankfully made our way in the past 20 years or so, we now have (probably) just as many posthumous titles as those Kerouac published in his lifetime. These have added exponentially to our understanding toward what Kerouac achieved in his own right as an American writer. However, there is still much more that can be published. Or, think of them as my Holy Grails.

Here are some:

  • The complete manuscript of The Town and the City with all of its stand-alone prose Kerouac typed for possible use in the novel
  • A collection of Kerouac’s various film-related prose, drawings and movie treatments like “Being a Tathagata” & “Tathagata: A Movie Novel”
  • A collection of Kerouac’s various proto-versions of On the Road (Gone on the Road, Cody Deaver, and many short but compelling fragments of writing)
  • The Collected Letters of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady (edited by Dave Moore again! )
  • Unexpurgated and chronological notebooks/journals in a multi-volume set
  • An exhaustive collection of Kerouac’s early prose arranged in chronological order so as to see and appreciate his development as a writer
  • Kerouac’s “Self-Ultimacy” period documented with such works as Supreme Reality; God’s Daughter; Dialogs in Introspection; The Repertoire of Modern Ideas; The Dark Corridor  and a novella called I Bid You Love Me (replete with self-inflicted blood droplets). Kerouac burned some of this work, but it is important because it documents a shift in Kerouac’s artistic consciousness.
  • A collection of Kerouac’s spiritual texts (Book of Prayers; The Blessedness Surely To Be Believed; Bodhi (Kerouac had typed and edited this book to completion); The Long Night of Life; The Diamond Vow of God’s Wisdom)
  • Any and all of the 50+ diaries Kerouac maintained chiefly from 1956 until shortly before his death in 1969.
  • Various collections of correspondence between his Lowell friends; John Clellon Holmes (over 100 just from Holmes); Carolyn Cassady; Henri Cru and much more miscellanea, such as letters from Esperanza Villanueva https://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/beat/kerouac-tristessaTristessa), Bea Franco (Terry the “Mexican Girl” in On the Road) and Mary Carney (Maggie Cassidy). I think letters to and from his immediate family is also warranted since his parents are constantly castigated by biographers. There is also a body of letters between JK and his agent, Sterling Lord that could be of significant importance (much like the letters between Maxwell Perkins and Hemingway/Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe).
  • Publishing facsimile notebooks for Visions of Cody and Mexico City Blues or Book of Sketches would be incredible.
  • Prefacing a novel like Maggie Cassidy with its original incarnation as Springtime Mary and his January/February 1953 notebooks (4 total) would be a unique vantage toward understanding how Kerouac  eked out a novel from several notebooks into a typescript.
  • A real collection of all of his poetry
  • Visions of Bill (over 70 holograph pages worth focused on William Burroughs!)
  • Benzedrine Vision written while in Mexico City in 1952 perhaps combined with Book of Daydreams written while staying with Neal & Carolyn Cassady at San Luis Obispo, California in May 1953.
  • The Memory Babe workbook written while living in Northport, Long Island in April 1958 (and its resulting typed scroll of 4 typed pages).
  • The personal notebooks maintained during the 1960s would shed much light on Kerouac’s thoughts, preoccupations and writing during this little understood period of time. One of these notebooks for example is from 1961 and it’s titled “Some Holy Notes Taken Down on Sacred Mushrooms Especially for Timothy Leary” which is about 59 pages long.
  • Tics was typed up from a notebook written on June 28, 1953. It could be compiled with other experimental writings along the lines of the standalone https://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/beat/earwitness-testimony-jack-kerouacs-old-angel-midnightOld Angel Midnight.

These are items off of the top of my head. There are a myriad of possibilities that exist for a writer of this magnitude. Maybe the world will have enough of being bottle-fed On the Road via Hollywood and will be ready now for Kerouac’s more intense and focused visionary writings.

 

Share on TwitterShare on Facebook

Paul Maher Jr.

Paul Maher Jr. is the author of Kerouac: His Life and Work (2007), Jack Kerouac's American Journey (2007), and, with Stephanie Nikopoulos, Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. He is editor of Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac (2005). His book, I Live In Two Worlds: The Literary Cosmos of Jack Kerouac will be published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2017.

Author: Paul Maher Jr. Tags: 1960s, Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac Category: Beat Generation January 16, 2013

You might also like:

Kerouac and Van Gogh -- Paul Maher Jr.
This is IT: Van Gogh and Kerouac
29 Russell St., 1999, by Joshua Medsker
Neal and Carolyn Cassady’s house at 29 Russell St., San Francisco
On the Road manuscript scroll - Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road Manuscript Scroll
A.D. Winans & Jack Micheline in 1996
I Am San Francisco

Comments

  1. Paul Maher Jr. says

    March 30, 2013 at 5:01 pm

    per cityCityCITY – I believe it is published as is . . .

    Reply
  2. Horst Spandler says

    February 22, 2013 at 7:12 am

    To specify: What I meant was – since cityCityCITY was originally conceptualized as a novel, is there a chance that there is more in the vaults than what’s been published as a short story?

    Reply
  3. Horst Spandler says

    February 22, 2013 at 4:54 am

    What about Kerouac’s science fiction story “cityCityCITY”?
    http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/citycitycity-jack-kerouacs-science-fiction/

    Reply
  4. Simon G. says

    January 17, 2013 at 10:53 am

    Interesting stuff.

    Also, of special interest to me (if not others), would be his two (incomplete?) works in French, “La Nuit Est Ma Femme” (AKA “Les Travaux de Michel Bretagne” AKA “Les confidences de Michel Bretagne”) and “Ma folle naissance crepusculaire”.

    Also, something which includes some of the things you’ve mentioned, a complete and (emphasis) *unedited* collection of his letters.

    Regards.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I accept the Privacy Policy

 

DONATE TO BLACK LIVES MATTER

BLACK LIVES MATTER

The EM newsletter

Receive fresh poetry, reviews, essays, art, and literary news every Wednesday!


Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

Subscribe Submissions Support

Recent features

  • My Father’s Map
  • On Waiting
  • Seeing Las Meninas in Madrid, 1994
  • Visual poems from 23 Bodhisattvas by Chris Stephenson
  • Historical Punctum: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard Through the Lens of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
  • Panic In The Rear-View Mirror: Exploring The Work of Richard Siken and Ann Gale
  • “Art has side effects,” I said.

Books

Biblio
© 2000–2023 D. Enck / Empty Mirror.
Copyright of all content remains with its authors.
Privacy Policy · Privacy Tools · FTC disclosures