Dharma Bums and more - photo 1
Dharma Bums and more - photo 2

Dharma Bums and more

Starting price
$ 4 000
Auction dateClassic
07.12.2022 10:00UTC -04:00
Auctioneer
CHRISTIE'S
Event location
USA, New York
Archive
The auction is completed. No bids can be placed anymore.
Archive
ID 859747
Lot 228 | Dharma Bums and more
KEROUAC, Jack (1922-1969). Typed letter signed (“Jack”) to Ed White [9 June 1958].

Octavo. Single leaf; recto only; light paperclip impression; one autograph emendation, clarifying a word that had run off the page. With envelope addressed in type, postmarked Northport, New York. [Together with:] KEROUAC, Jack (1922-1969). Autograph note signed (“Jorge & Jack”), [ca. summer 1955].12mo.; torn from a cigarette wrapper; creased; mounted to larger page. With later explanatory note from White. In full: “Dear Eisenhower, We love you. – You’re the great big white father.”

“I have a new book coming out in the Fall, The Dharma Bums, that I would like you to vouchsafe an opinion upon, sir.”

Jack chides White for not answering his long April letter about the museums of Europe. On the Road was gaining fame, and The Dharma Bums was scheduled for publication in the fall. He writes in part:

I am a veritable Boswell of busyness. Still another book comes out 1959, either Desolation Angels or Doctor Sax. (I prefer the latter, sir, because it is a dark myth of Gothic New England and would take me off the “hipster” hook.) Desolation Angels is rather well-written but deals mostly with the peregrinations and machinations and musings and lipstrokings of our Friend Howl Allen Ginsberg, and other poets including Gregorio Corso yet the central figure seems to emerge again as Neal Cass, I love to write about that crazy sonumbitch, in this book we go to the racetrack and what a wild day at the races! Hilarious, sir, to say the least.

Jack was still sensitive about his lack of closeness with Hal Chase: “Tell Hal when you see him I still feel the same about him and he can go right on the way he’s been doing – that I at least appreciate his putting me down BEFORE I was famous.”

“Gone are the pure days when I used to get excited in life,” Jack writes, “now I need wine for excitement.” He closes with an explanation for not having kept contact with Beverly, calling her “rather sloppy” for passing TB on to him, claiming that he got rid of it by sleeping outdoors for six months “in the grasses of Marin and in the heights of the Cascades.”
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
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23.11.2022 – 07.12.2022
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