A long lost letter to Jack Kerouac that inspired an entirely new genre of literature, as well as the Beat generation, has been recovered.
After receiving the letter, Kerouac ditched his first drafts of On The Road and wrote the novel in the style of what eventually became Beat literature.
Kerouac thought that the letter, from Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady, was lost. As a result. the letter remained part of a legend. Kerouac once stated that publication of the letter would have made Cassady a star of literature in his own right.
"It was the greatest piece of writing I ever saw, better'n anybody in America, or at least enough to make Melville, Twain, Dreiser, Wolfe, I dunno who, spin in their graves," said Kerouac, describing the letter.
The letter's journey is an interesting one. Kerouac stated that he loaned the letter to poet Allen Ginsberg, who then loaned it out to another friend that lived on a houseboat. Kerouac believed that person dropped the letter overboard after being careless with it.
However, that wasn't the case. Ginsberg wanted the letter published and mailed it to Golden Goose Press in San Francisco. There, it remained in an envelope, unopened, sitting in the publisher's archives. However, when the company went under, the owners planned to throw every unopened submission into the trash.
Fate stepped in, though. The publishing house shared an office with a small music label. The owner of the music label took every manuscript and letter from the archives and stored them in his home, where they still remained unseen.
Those submissions stayed in that house until the death of the man who stored them. His daughter, Jean Spinosa, found the 18-page letter after cleaning out the house. Although she was familiar with both Kerouac and Cassady, she didn't realize that the letter was the famed "Joan Anderson Letter," so-named for a woman mentioned in the letter's text.
Spinosa later discovered the importance of what she found after taking it to a dealer who worked with historical documents. Now, the letter is up for auction as part of a collection that also includes papers by ee Cummings, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Penn Warren.
"It's invaluable," says biographer Dennis McNally said. "It inspired Kerouac greatly in the direction he wanted to travel, which was this spontaneous style of writing contained in a letter that had just boiled out of Neal Cassady's brain."
[Photo Credit: May/Flickr]
