May 16, 2001 through July 1, 2001

Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce an exhibition and catalogue devoted to letters and manuscripts composed by Jack Kerouac between 1941 and 1964. Dozens of lengthy, heartfelt and revealing missives--many of them unpublished--will be on display. The accompanying catalogue, detailing over 75 such letters and a handful of short manuscripts, includes an essay by Joyce Johnson on Kerouac.s epistolary habits entitled "Acquainted with the Void."

Johnson locates "the beginning of his rootlessness and of his extraordinarily prolific letter-writing" in the 1939 move from his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts to New York City, armed with a football scholarship to Horace Mann. Noting that "[e]ven after the publication of On the Road when he could afford to make long-distance calls, Kerouac continued to write to the widely scattered people he felt close to as if the phone had never been invented," she praises the "rush of luminous physical detail" he recorded in these letters, which "contain the essence of what we need to know about him as a writer and as a man. Read together," she adds, they stand as "a surprisingly coherent and illuminating autobiography." In them Kerouac documents his love affairs, marriages, and divorce; his love for his friends; the conception, composition, and publication of On the Road, which made him a celebrity and cult figure overnight; and his reaction to the attention lavished on his work and his life, and on the generation he helped to define. Thirty-six letters to Neal Cassady--his intimate friend, muse in literature and in life, and the model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road--anchor the collection. These letters offer a revealing glimpse into their intense and chaotic relationship, one of the most celebrated and scrutinized of 20th-century literature. The balance of the material fleshes out other crucial personal and professional ties. The earliest document, composed in 1941 to his sister Nin, is filled with youthful hope and vigor. Writing throughout his life to Nin and her husband, and to his mother, he shares his fear of, and desire for, domestic tranquillity, expressing an ambivalence that ultimately pushed him into further seclusion with his mother.

Letters from the 1940s and '50s to Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Hal Chase, Gary Snyder, Carl Solomon, and other prominent Beat figures disclose the origins of On the Road and the term "Beat Generation," and evince Kerouac's early enthusiasm for his writing and that of his closest friends; he sees in Cassady the next Walt Whitman, and calls on Ginsberg and comrades to "revolutionize literature." They reveal his thoughts on the writing, editing, and publication of On the Road, and on the popular acclaim and critical backlash that followed. His initial euphoria with work, love, and life turned bitter. After 1960, he wrote fewer and fewer letters, and those he did write were full of apprehension, fear, distrust, and disappointment. In November 1960, finding no one in whom to confide his thoughts, he began a letter to himself expressing anger at the hordes of fans .pestering. him and his mother; frustration at the endless interviews motivated by the fact that he's "a famous and 'rich' author and the bloody King of the Beatniks"; and despair at his inability to write: "[M]y visions of late have been so horrible I hesitate to scare people whether good or bad people...Let them find out for themselves what I'm thinking. Shall I tell them?"

gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 9:30 to 5:30

contact: John McWhinnie