RR Auction has a typed, signed letter from Jack Kerouac for auction at RR Auction. The letter was written to Irving Rosenthal at the Chicago Review, and postmarked January 29, 1958.
It reads, in part:
“I do have something for your summer issue of Zen, five pages of prose about Buddhistic meditation in the woods, an excerpted chapter from my novel-in-progress entitled The Dharma Bums. Let me know if you want me to send you that, and please sorta promise you’ll print it (it’s highly publishable)….I can send you Gary Snyder’s translation of the thousand year old poems of Han Shan the Zen Lunatic poet of Cold Mountain in the T’ien T’ai district of old China, including his translation of the Preface, a classic, untranslated by anyone else at present….If you tell Allan Watts that you plan to use Snyder and Whalen in the issue, it will interest him greatly. Mention to Watts that I said it was his duty to furnish something for your issue in order to turn the wheel of the Dharma in 1958. No, I haven’t made a semi-serious study of Buddhism but a very serious one indeed, in fact I’ve had visions and reassurances and all kinds of wild gnostic certainties handed to me. My prose will explain that.”
