Kerouac, Jack | The Town and The City, first edition of his debut novel

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$ 762
AuktionsdatumClassic
08.12.2023 12:00UTC -04:00
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Sotheby´s
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Vereinigten Staaten, New York
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ID 1108768
Los 49 | Kerouac, Jack | The Town and The City, first edition of his debut novel
Kerouac, Jack
The Town and the City. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950

8vo. Publisher's red cloth, stamped in gilt, spine gilt. Dust jacket by Leo Manso; light wear, especially to joints and head and foot of spine.

The first edition of Kerouac's first novel.

Kerouac chose to be called John for his first publication, changing to Jack for the publication of On the Road. In lot 43, a excited Kerouac shares that his novel has been accepted for publication by Robert Giroux, with whom he worked on the revisions of the work into late 1949. The book was published in 1950 to a considerable print run of 10,500 copies. It did not sell well, and Kerouac felt marred by this initial lack of success until the eventual publication of On the Road in 1957.

On the dust-jacket, Kerouac describes it in a letter to Ed White as: "simple, unostentatious...depicting a river winding through New England countryside" (lot 47).

Kerouac related his novel to one of the basic themes in American literature: "Lowell, like Winesburg, Ohio, or Asheville, North Carolina or Fresno, California or Hawthorne's Salem, is always the place where the darkness of the trees by the river, on a starry night, gives a hint of that inscrutable future Americans are always longing and longing for. And when they find that future, not till then, they begin looking back, with sorrows, and an understanding of how man haunts the earth, pacing, prowling, circling in the shades, and the intelligence of the compass, pointing to nothing in sight save starry passion" (Selected Letters, 1940–1956, p. 221).
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