Discussion: Letter That Inspired Jack Kerouac's 'On The Road' Discovered

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Discussion for article #230486

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Are there any JackKerouacs in this generation?

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Wow! I want to read it.

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…we call them “bloggers.”

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All this time we thought the letter was scattered like lost words.

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My father didn’t know who Allen Ginsberg was… but he loved poetry

Huh?

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"The long-lost, thought drowned in the Pacific, 16,000 letter from Neal Cassady, which inspired Kerouac’s On The Road, has been found. "

I think someone lost a ‘word’ there.

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Wow…wow…and WOW!!!

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“For her part, Spinosa says, she’s just happy her father rescued the letter from the trash. She’s hoping whoever buys it will give the public a chance to see it.”

Ms. Spinosa, you currently own the letter. If you want the public to see it, publish it!

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I just hope it can live up to the hype. I mean, here it has been venerated for decades, has it’s own mystique. Because of the supposed watery loss of this document, most assuredly forever - none could say them Nay at the unexpressed brilliance of it all.

Like that dream you knew was going to change the world and hastily jotted down on your bedside table becoming NyQuil addled hen scratching in the morning?

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Ah. 16,000 WORDS. I was trying and trying to figure out what the hell a 16,000 letter was.

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Are there any people who have read Jack Kerouac in this generation?

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Like almost everyone else of my age, I loved Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassady et al. For a sober, less romanticized description of life in their scene, see Carolyn Cassady’s “Off the Road”.

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I stayed out of the drug culture during the 60s and 70s but I lived in California beach towns for a number of years and it was impossible not to hear stories. I remember stories about a famous houseboat in Sausalito from about 1967 to 1968. I believe that’s the one referenced to Kerouac. Does anyone know the story on that? It seems to come up in a number of related stories by very different people.

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Yes, why doesn’t the current owner publish it? Scan it and put it up on on Scribd.

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I read Dharma Bums when I was about 18…
and it changed the way I write…
heck, it probably changed the way I think.
Later lived in the Berkeley neighborhood
some of it took part in. That was cool.

There’s no way this doc could ever live up to the hype…
but I’m still eager to see what set Kerouac on
his ass so completely! :slight_smile:

And while it would be nice for her to scan and post
this document for free…how many of us would really
pass up the huge potential payday?
I won’t pretend that I would.
(and it’s not like the full content won’t get out anyway).
Yeah, I could only criticize her hypocritically… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Would it lose some $$$$ value if she published it? Pretty sure she made a couple of copies.

I read On The Road in my thirties when I was living in Europe and feeling a little homesick. Finding more of Kerouac’s books was a challenge until I went into Shakespeare & Company on the Left Bank in Paris. Ahhhhh. Great memories.

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You mean people in high school? In their twenties?

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So! It’s actually Cassady’s fault I had to read that piece of crap. Without that “inspiration” Kerouac might never have been heard from.

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We can hope not.