"Never worked so intensely" - photo 1

"Never worked so intensely"

Lot 197
07.12.2022 10:00UTC -05:00
Classic
Sold
$ 6 930
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUSA, New York
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The auction is completed. No bids can be placed anymore.
Archive
ID 859716
Lot 197 | "Never worked so intensely"
Estimate value
$ 7 000 – 10 000
KEROUAC, Jack (1922-1969). Autograph letter signed (“Jack”) to Ed White, 16 [August] 1947, postmarked Sausalito, California. Unpublished.

Quarto. Single leaf of ruled paper; recto only; creased; pencil, with “WRITE!” added in ink as an afterthought following signature. With envelope addressed in autograph.

"My ambition is to come back to Denver someday in a Buick convertible with a case of Scotch.”

The first full letter from Kerouac to White, sent from Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. At the end of the three-week Denver stay memorialized in On the Road, Jack continued his first cross-country hitchhiking venture, heading over the Rocky Mountains to California. White and his brother Frank drove him, dressed in his lumberjack shirt and cap, carrying a canvas suitcase, to a highway west of town. White's mother, who had adopted an immediate motherly attraction to Jack, provided him with a travel lunch in a brown paper bag. Though White briefed him on the beautiful passes and scenic sites he should see while crossing the Rocky Mountains, notably Rabbit Ears Pass, which was, in the summer of 1947, a spectacular drive, Kerouac of course ended up going where his truck driver took him, which proved to be a different route.

He reports, “Here in ’Frisco I’m promptly getting a job as some sort of cop (of all things) guarding dormitories for an overseas construction unit [...] with a .32 automatic on my hip. It’s a very funny twist.” And although it never happened, Jack was at that moment in his fantasy, “waiting for the right ship to come along, a ’round-the-world passenger ship.”

In what would prove to be typical, he announces his most recent creative accomplishment:

Meanwhile I actually knocked off a full-length 40,000 word screen story in six days of “feverish labourings,” while waiting for the guard job to come through. Never worked so intensely. Having it copyrighted. Then, in two weeks, on my days off, flying down to Hollywood to try to sell it. It may or may not be a good story, I don’t know. But there it is. I’d appreciate your mentioning it to [Justin] Brierly and writing back any suggestions he might venture. [...] Let me know.

He concludes the letter with an often-repeated intention to return to Denver, but more realistically adds, “I’ll be seeing you in N.Y. around November”—and it was there that he and Ed were to see much more of each other.
Auction house category:Letters, documents and manuscripts
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23.11.2022 – 07.12.2022
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