Atop an Underwood

Description

Before Jack Kerouac expressed the spirit of a generation in his 1957 classic, On the Road, he spent years figuring out how he wanted to live and, above all, learning how to write. Atop an Underwood brings together more than sixty previously unpublished works that Kerouac wrote before he was twenty-two, ranging from stories and poems to plays and parts of novels, including an excerpt from his 1943 merchant marine novel, The Sea Is My Brother. These writings reveal what Kerouac was thinking, doing, and dreaming during his formative years, and reflect his primary literary influences. Readers will also find in these works the source of Kerouac’s spontaneous prose style.

Uncovering a fascinating missing link in Kerouac’s development as a writer, Atop an Underwood is essential reading for Kerouac fans, scholars, and critics.

Introduction
Part One: Pine Forests and Pure Thought 1936-1940
from Background
Repulsion May Race Here in Exhibition Feature!!
from Football Novella
Jack Lewis’s Baseball Chatter
[One Long Strange Dream]
Count Basie’s Band Best in Land; Group Famous for “Solid” Swing
Go Back
Nothing
A Play I Want to Write
Concentration
We Thronged
[A Day in September]
[I Know I Am August]
Radio Script: The Spirit of ’14
[I Remember the Days of My Youth]
from Raw Rookie Nerves
Where the Road Begins
New York Nite Club—
Part Two: An Original Kicker 1941
from Background
There’s Something About a Cigar
God
If I Were Wealthy
[One Sunday Afternoon in July]
The Birth of a Socialist
No Connection: A Novel That I Don’t Intend to Finish
On the Porch, Remembering
The Sandbank Sage
Farewell Song, Sweet from My Trees
[I Have to Pull Up My Stakes and Roll, Man]
Odyssey (Continued)
[At 18, I Suddenly Discovered the Delight of Rebellion]
Observations
Definition of a Poet
America in the Night
Woman Going to Hartford
Old Love-Light
I Tell You It Is October!
[Here I Am at Last with a Typewriter]
[Atop an Underwood: Introduction]
The Good Jobs
From Radio City to the Crown
…The Little Cottage by the Sea…
The Juke Box is Saving America
…Hartford After Work….
…Legends and Legends….
…A Kerouac That Turned Out Sublime….
The Father of My Father
Credo
…Hungry Young Writer’s Notebook….
A Young Writer’s Notebook
[I Am Going to Stress a New Set of Values]
[I Am My Mother’s Son]
[Howdy!]
Today
This I Do Know—
Search by Night
Part Three: To Portray Life Accurately 1942-1943
from Background
Sadness at Six
The Joy of Duluoz
Famine for the Heart
[The Very Thing I Live For]
The Mystery
Thinking of Thomas Wolfe on a Winter’s Night
from The Sea Is My Brother (Merchant Mariner)
Beauty as a Lasting Truth
My Generation, My World
The Wound of Living
Wounded in Action
The Romanticist
The Boy from Philadelphia
The Two Americans
AcknowledgmentsJack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of “one vast book,” The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.US

Additional information