Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg

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“[An] essential Beat masterpiece.” —The Village Voice.

Perhaps one of the last great dual correspondences of the twentieth century, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters reveals not only the process of creation of the two most celebrated members of the Beat Generation, but also the unfolding of a remarkable friendship of immense pathos and spiritual depth. Through this exhilarating exchange of letters, two-thirds of which have never been published before, Kerouac and Ginsberg emerge first and foremost as writers of artistic passion, innovation, and genius. Vivid and enthralling, the letters, which date from their first meeting in 1944 to Kerouac’s untimely death in 1969, chronicle the endless struggle, anguish, and sacrifice involved in giving form to their literary visions.”The Kerouac-Ginsberg letters are marvelous and lively. The exchange ranks among the best examples of completely engaged literary correspondence we know in the past 50 years.”
–The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Open-hearted and richly detailed. . . Rich in news about fellow Beat writers, including John Clellon Holmes, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso, among others, their correspondence provides a bird’s-eye view of what went into the making and marketing of the Beat Generation. The publication of these letters between two of America’s leading 20th-century authors is an extraordinary event in American literature, particularly welcome in this era of chat and Twitter.”
–Library Journal

“Documenting the adventures of “Old Bean” (Allen) and “Jackiboo” from their days at Columbia through October 1969, weeks before Kerouac’s death, the letters form a kind of essential Beat masterpiece, and offer hilarious behind-the-scenes commentary on all the “mad ones” involved.”
–The Village Voice

“[E]ditors Stanford and Morgan showcase 200 high-voltage letters, most never before published, that embody the energy and psychic hunger that fueled the creativity of these giants of American literature . . . This incandescent collection deepens our understanding of an essential literary revolution.”
–Booklist

“The collection reads like a Dostoyevsky novel”
–The New York Observer

“In the seductive collection they’ve called Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, the editors Bill Morgan and David Stanford stake out a distinct piece of literary turf. They do this despite the fact that Kerouac and Ginsberg were expansive letter writers, that each wrote to many correspondents, and that reams of these other letters have already shown up elsewhere.”
–The New York Times (Daily Review)

“The depth of their [Kerouac and Ginsberg’s] development as friends but especially as writers has never been shown more clearly than in this stunning new collection, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters. . . Ginsberg biographer Bill Morgan and David Stanford, a longtime editor at Viking, provide readers with a volume as illuminating as it is indispensable for understanding these writers and their work.”
–The Los Angeles Times

“Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters is destined to become an indispensable item on any fan’s bookshelf. . . The collected Kerouac-Ginsberg correspondence is pure literary gold that fans and scholars will mine for decades.”
–San Francisco Chronicle

Jack 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.

Bill Morgan is an archival consultant, editor, and writer. He is the author and editor of more than 40 books including I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg; The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation; William S. Burroughs’ Rub Out the Word; and The Letters of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He has worked as the archivist for Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, Oliver Sacks, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among many others.

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