Kerouac in North Carolina

I felt like crying out over the woods and rooftops of North Carolina announcing the glorious and simple truth.
–Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

I never go to town, there is no town, Rocky Mt is railroad mainline town.
Talk sometimes to eccentric characters with wild red faces and wild gray hair,
from woods, drinkin corn on warpt steps of Saturday afternoon.
–Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg

I’m with you in Rocky Mount. . . 
Allen Ginsberg, Howl

For Jack Kerouac, North Carolina was an occasional and accidental home which  he came to solely because his sister, Carolyn–“Nin” to her family–married a man she’d met in the Air Force, Paul Blake, and they came back to his North Carolina home to work with the phone company, Carolina Telephone & Telegraph. For Kerouac, home was almost always where his mother lived, and once she re-located to the Blakes’, their homes became his: two in Rocky Mount and another in Kinston (with at least three temporaries along the way), before they moved to Florida.

However, in one of his earliest extended exercises in self-definition, written in 1941, he seems already enamored of North Carolina, years before he’d ever visit.

He begins “I Am My Mother’s Son” (reprinted in Atop an Underwood)::

I am my mother’s son. All other identities
are artificial and recent. Naked, basic, actually,
I am my mother’s son. I emerged from her womb
and set out into the earth. The earth gave me
another identity, that of name, personality,
appearance, character, and spirit. The earth
is my grandmother: I am the earth’s grandson. . . 

It concludes:

Say, fellow, you know who I
am? I’m Jack Kerouac, the
Writer: Husky, handsome,
intellectual Jack Kerouac.
Notice how I comb my hair
and see my handsome gar-
ments. I’m the boy from
Brazil. I love jazz, I
love North Carolina. i
love Socialism. I’m sel-
fish, I’m irresponsbile,
I’m weak, I’m afraid. I’m 
Jack Kerouac the poet, the
seaman, the scholar, the
laborer, the newspaperman,
the lover, the athlete,
the flyer, the Lowellian? (I am my mother’s son.)

Why North Carolina was on his mind when he was 19 isn’t clear. He had quit the Columbia University football team earlier that year (for the first time) and returned to his hometown, Lowell, Massachusetts, where he was working as a sports reporter, but had not traveled into the South. My best guess as to why NC sneaks into this list so early in his life is his admiration of Asheville’s Thomas Wolfe. Gerald Nicosia notes that he started reading Wolfe while in high school, and that “He never stopped reading Wolfe with amazement and delight.” Years later, Kerouac would credit Wolfe with “awakening him to the idea of America as a poem, rather than just a place to work and struggle.”

Kerouac didn’t make it to North Carolina on his first trip into the South, which he chronicles in Vanity of Dulouz– he doesn’t get farther than northern Virginia.

So his first visits were with his mother and sister and her family, with whom he would visit in North Carolina at least a dozen times from 1947-56 for stays that were usually intended to be extended; by the early 1950s, he was calling North Carolina home. He used Rocky Mount especially as a base from which to travel and as a setting in five of his novels, most notably as an important early scene in On the Road. He wrote all or part of ten books while staying at the Blakes’ two Rocky Mount homes and at one in Kinston, which he wrote about only in letters and journals. He also stayed for brief periods at a transitional Blake residence in Rocky Mount and two in Kinston.

Although North Carolina settings are important to On the Road and The Dharma Bums especially, none of the books published while Kerouac was alive detail his North Carolina experiences as extensively and as brilliantly as in the best portions of his Book of Sketches. Published in 2006 as it was originally composed by Kerouac in his notebooks, it might easily have been titled Sketches from Rocky Mount so heavily does it document his time there, especially while staying at the Blakes’ Big Easonburg residence in 1952. Many of these sketches are among his finest writing, and they’re good enough to forgive the pieces that fall flat in their experiment and range. These excerpts from his Carolina life also fill in several key points on his timeline and also offer some of the most personal details of his relationship with his sister, Nin, and her family.

1947
June: JK travels to North Carolina with his mother, Gabrielle, for sister Nin’s marriage to Paul Blake. The Blakes were living in an apartment in Kinston near a Black section of town, prior to moving to Tarboro Street in Rocky Mount.

July: JK includes a 1,000 word nonfiction piece titled “Down South” in his journals. It’s a controlled musing on religious beliefs–“I detect a strong dualism,” he writes in it.

The excerpts below include the beginning and end (which I’ve titled Parable of the Dog) from “Down South” as well as a short piece from its middle, Parable of the Fish (also my title), as published in Windblown World. 

Down South

After ten days in a different part of the world, among different people, in the world itself, and not to the night’s landscape of one’s own soul (and an “artist’s soul,” at that), after only ten days pursuing different aims and so on, how easily feelings can change on the surface and make one realize the mutability of opinions. When I said, ten days ago, “My kingdom is not of this world”–this was only an opinion perhaps and not a feeling because now, again, the world opens up as a place of powerful things for me to feed upon, the excluding moralities vanish in an October rush of excitement, hunger, joy and zeal, the self-disgust of lonely introspection becomes the social gregarious keenness so necessary as a fuel to get one around in things.  .  . .

My grave and specific thoughts–

[Parable of the Chained Dog]

A little mangy dog is tied by a chain to a fence by a Southern poor white family, it whines in the night, it is ill fed, and cruelly treated. Shall I free this dog?–sneak down at night and release him? Will he bark at me, bite me and despise me in the dead of night for meddling in the affairs of this unmoral organic earth. I am not God: What shall I do in this suffering world? Suffer. . .  If the little mangy dog suffers, and I try to help him, has he not the right to despise me for assuming that he cannot bear his own lot.

[Parable of the Fish]

We catch a fish, a bass, we call it George, hand it over to a Medieval hook, hang it over the side to live and “keep fresh” with a hook torn through its dumb mouth. We finally go home, lock George up in a dark compartment to suffocate and die, alone, while we drive along in the fresh Carolina air. O Jesus!–your fishermen held millions in their nets! Dumb writhing fish, dying and working parched gills in this world. Oh God!–this is all of us, it happens to all of us. What shall we do, where shall we go, and when do we die like this? What is there to say here, that wasn’t said–we are doomed to suffering and darkest death. We are fish wriggling in the net fighting one another for the watery parts where we can yet breathe. (Therefore the tenant farmer on his gray rickety porch in the noonday sun, poor humbled, cheated, dying–and therefore the big tobacco man from Wilson [a nearby tobacco-auction town] with his big 42-foot yacht in the waters, his case of Scotch, his radio, his clean white trousers) Jesus–your only answer to all things alive! and you have made it hard, hard, even as Our Father made it hard.–
   So the poor man of poverty and silence, and the big city of talkative cocktail hours. What shall we do about that?
   Bless it all–it’s God’s whole works.

–Kinston, NC 
July 1947

July 14: JK writes from Ozone Park, NY, to William Burroughs, in Mexico City: “I just spent an interesting two weeks in the deep south and I wish you could have seen some of the things I saw.” He recounts a couple of incidents involving local Blacks–cleavers, guns, screams–and then adds, “I don’t know why I mention all these things, but I get a kick out of it.”

December: Again with his mother, JK travels to Rocky Mount for Christmas with the Blakes, then to New York for New Year’s, and back to Rocky Mount for a few days in January.

December 28: JK, back in NY, writes in his journal:

Back again, to the great snow of ’47, which I had to go and miss. No snow at all in eastern N. Carolina. It was a dull trip too, but I got a sort of rest anyway although I took sick. That makes  12,000 miles of traveling for 1947 for me anyway, which isn’t exactly a dull or lazy year–along with the 250,000 words of writing. Tonight, recuperating from an intestinal illness, I gazed at my novel and its imminent conclusion–within 2 months. And what snow outside, what wonderful tons of snow everywhere! I love to see New Yorkers without their infernal cars, for once. They seem to love this respite from the machine.

1948
March 12: JK writes in his journal, in NY:

Guess what?!–on my birthday today wrote 4,500-words–scribbling away till six-thirty in the morning next day. . . My mother and sister and Paul gave me presents (trousers, shirts, tie). I don’t scoff at ties, because at the money I make writing I can’t positively afford  standard salaried jokes about them. But those 4500 words are a new recoreds ad it looks like I’ll finish the book after all.

March 16:  JK writes from NY to the Blakes in NC to thank them for their gifts and he also inquires about their new home in Rocky Mount, the Tarboro Street residence that gets a cameo in On the Road.

Late May. JK and his mother rush to Rocky Mount for the premature birth of Paul Blake, Jr.

June 5: JK writes in his journal:

News came that my sister is gravely ill in North Carolina from childbirth, so my mother and I took off immediately. From Rocky Mount, also on June 5, he writes to Allen Ginsberg: “Please tell Ed Stringham to hold up awhile on the Kazan interview until I get back from N. Carolina where my sister Carolyn is very ill, a complicated Caesarian, etc. I’ll let you know what happened.

June 6 – June 13: JK writes in his journal:

It developed allright, after much worry. She gave birth to a three-pound 7-month infant, by Caesarian. The best of attention at Durham Medical Center saved her life. As well as the baby boys, life. I came back to do my work, my mother stayed down to care for Nin. Now I really must sell my book, make money. While down there Paul and I worked o his garaged and around the place, and I got a foretaste of my ambition for a ranch with Paulk Nin, my mother, Mike, his family, myself and my own future family all together, a real homestead and stockade, I suddenly realized that northern California, around Mendocino Forest, is the place for my big homestead–with San Francisco nearby a hundred miles or so. More on that later. But now I’ve work and responsibility and human plans ahead of me.

June 14: In his journal, back in NY, JK muses on his imagined homestead, mentions his “dormant feeling in the grave though almost sullen South.” He free-associates on gravity / grave before concluding ,”there is much gravity in the South, and no glee whatsoever, even, almost, among the little children, who also seem ‘sullen.’

June 21: JK writes in his journal, “Received a beautiful batch of letters from everybody, from Ma, Paul, Neal Cassady, Bill Burroughs in New Orleans and the address of a beautiful nurse in Durham, N.C., my sister Carolyn’s nurse.”

August 23: JK writes in his journal, in NY:  ‘Told my mother she ought to go live down South with the family instead of spending al her tine slaving in the shoe factories in order to earn just money to spend o the system of expenses that is our society.” He also critiques himself:

The only trouble with my writing is too many words. . . but you see, “true thoughts” about in the town & City, which nullifies the sligh harm of wordiness. Now I’ll sharpen thigns, I have another novel in mind–“On the Road”–which I keep thinking about: about two guys hitchhiking to California in search of something they don’t really find, and losing themselves on the road, and come all the way back hopeful of something else. Also I’m finding a new principle of writing.

September 9: JK writes from Ozone Park, New York, to Allen Ginsberg: “I’m very busy staving off the horror of form-letter rejections from publishers and plotting new attempts. . . . I’m  going to North Carolina to run brother in law’s parking lot and woo a nurse and have a rest from this awful shallow literary world I have to do business with. . . .”–a plan that does not work out.

This letter is reprinted in Jack Kerouac / Allen Ginsberg: The Letters. 

October 2, 1948: JK writes two letters from Rocky Mount to Neal Cassady. In the first, he says that he’s”down here to run a parking lot which would have earned a couple hundred bucks if it hadn’t rained. The lot is right in front of the county fair. Now it’s all mud, & I’m still broke.” He also writes:

Here I am sitting in a shack, writing on a board table, as it rains, and as the radio plays colored music in this land where the colored are pushed back & sccorned & ‘kept in their place.’ And, Neal, there’s a woman called Mahalia Jackson who sings real sad, while, in the background, on  another station, there’s white audience laughter from some contest show in Nashville, Tenn. You see how it makes me feel, don’t you?

Both of these letters are reprinted in Selected Letters: 1940-1956.

December 15: JK writes from Ozone Park, New York, to Allen Ginsberg. This is one of the meanest letters he writes to him but after the vitriol, he then apologizes profusely before outlining Neal Cassady’s plan for a cross-country drive that will get him and his crew to Rocky Mount and then New York for New Year’s.  After a long recounting the phone call from Cassady that announces his plans–with dialog that’s almost straight from what will become On the Road–he adds, “I expect to see him in North Carolina around the 29th of December, and we will be back in New York for New Year’s eve.”

December 16: Jack Kerouac / Allen Ginsberg: The Letters includes one from JK to Allen Ginsberg on this date and suggests that it may have been written from Rocky Mount, but I believe textual references within it make it more likely that it was written from Ozone Park. Near its end, JK writes, “Meet me at Kazin’s Wednesday night and we’ll talk. On the other hand, no, meet me at Tartak’s at 4 Monday afternoon (today if you get the letter Mon.)”

December 25: At the Blakes’ Tarboro Street home, JK and his family are surprised by the sudden arrival of Neal Cassady in a new Hudson, fresh from a cross-country jaunt, with Neal’s ex-wife, Luanne Henderson, and Al Hinkle. They take Memere’s furniture to Long Island, return to Rocky Mount for Memere, and take her back to New York in time for New Year’s eve. This saga is chronicled in On the Road but the terminus is shifted to “Testament, Virginia” because JK’s agent didn’t think readers would believe a journey from NY to NC could happen so quickly–2,000 miles in less than 3 days. Thus Rocky Mount becomes Testament, Virginia, the only fictional town in JK’s works.

1951
June: After finishing his 86,000 word On the Road scroll in April; JK goes in June to the Blakes’ new home in Kinston, with his mother. He stays for several weeks, working on Pic and other projects while also dealing with recurrent thrombophlebitis, for which he would be hospitalized in New York in August.

July 15: JK writes from Kinston to Allen Ginsberg in New York: “I’ve been reading and thinking for TEN days with my leg up, and have come to many important conclusions. One of them is extensive cutting of ROAD, with insertions which I’m writing now.” He refers to a long letter to John Clellon Holmes in which he has written all his plans out in detail. 

Kinston is where his mother is first called Memere, a gift from Paul, Jr.’s attempt to say “grandma.” Because the houses on Spence Drive, where they lived, have been re-numbered, I couldn’t be sure which had been theirs–there is no longer a “286,” which was their number. The 1951 summer chronology isn’t clear, either–JK may have gone to Rocky Mount, then Kinston, and back to Rocky Mount before returning to New York, but it seems more likely that his summer was all in Kinston.

July 31: JK writes from Kinston to James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions in San Francisco, a short letter about William Burroughs’ wish to change some portions of the manuscript for Junky. This letter is reprinted in Selected Letters.

1952
April 7: JK writes from San Francisco to Carl Solomon in New York about his plans for publishing a 160-page excerpt from his “On the Road” scroll with Ace. Solomon, whose uncle, Aaron Wyn, owned Ace Books, was also Ginsberg’s lover (“Howl” is dedicated to him), worked for Ace, which would soon publish William Burroughs’ Junkie (by “William Lee”).  Kerouac wrote to him:

This is no dope idea, this is real money idea, the stretch of my ms. that begins “I first met Neal Pomeroy in 1947 but I didn’t travel on the road with him till 1948, just the tail end of that year, at Xmas time, North Carolina to New York City 450 miles, and back to NC, and back to New York City again, in 36 hours, with washing dishes in Philadelphia, a teahead ball in Ozone Park, and a southern drawl evening drive in Rocky Mount in between. And all that time Neal just talked and talked and talked.”

Kerouac did little to dispel the belief he typed On the Road in a frenzy on a teletype roll. As Hunt so thoroughly demonstrates, though, it was revised several times, sometimes extensively, after that initial composition, but the use of meeting Neal Cassady as a spark remained consistent in most drafts. Compare the beginning above with how the published On the Road begins: 

I first met Dean [Neal] not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.

July: After receiving a $250 advance for the On the Road excerpt from Ace books in April, JK travels to Mexico with Neal and Carolyn Cassady; after they return to Colorado, he goes on to Mexico City, where he mails a draft of Visions of Cody to Carl Solomon. In May and June he writes Dr. Sax.

On July 3, he left Mexico City for Rocky Mount, where he spends about six weeks, “as always,” Tom Clark writes, “the uneasy, penurious guest among skeptical relatives.”

July 28: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Allen Ginsberg in Patterson, New Jersey, a short, jazzy letter that begins “The word in the beginning was dark. . . ” He rushes its ending because “I have to go to work in five minutes and make $120 to cushion me against the shock of receiving that $250 downpayment as soon as I can muster up enough courage to read the contract with an interested and intelligent eye instead of just spoofing and goofing in romantic paranoias over its stately and solemn ledgerly edifices of prose, fact, and circumstance.”

August 7: JK sketches in his notebook, first watching his sister preparing supper:

Changed now to
dungaree shorts, gaudy
green sandals, blue vest
with white borders & a
little festive lovergirl ribbon
in her hair Carolyn prepares
the supper–
  “I better go over there &
fix that lawnmower,” ways
Paul standing in the kitchen
with LP at his thigh.
   “Supper’ll be ready at 
six.”
   Glancing at his watch
Paul goes off – to his landlord
Jack up the road–a man his
age, of inherited wealth, 
who spends all day in big
Easonburg walking around 
or sitting in his vast brick
House (Jacky Lee’s father)

or walking down the road
to see his 2 new cows–

This 62-page sketch uses the moments before a Saturday evening meal to explore his home and surroundings, especially the community store across the street and its near continuous action, all described with the eye of a artist, the mind of an ethnographer, and the language of a poet. It alone makes Book of Sketches the most essential of Kerouac’s Carolina texts.

It concludes:

All is well in
Rocky Mount, North
  Carolina as 5 0’clock
  in the afternoon shudders
on a raindrop leaf,
& the men’ll be coming
home.

August 8: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Carl Solomon and others at Ace Books regarding their concerns with the complete “On the Road” manuscript. This letter is reprinted in Selected Letters.

August 10: JK writes “Sounds in the Woods,” which is reprinted in Book of Sketches. This 5-page sketch, “written in Easonburg woods, at one point naked,” begins:

Karagoo Karagin
criastoshe, gobu,
bois-cracke, trou-or,
boisvert, greenwoods
beezy skilliagoo . . .

August 21: Neal Cassady writes a letter of recommendation (impeccably typed) for JK, who has applied for work with the railroad in Rocky Mount. Cassady writes that JK “has been my closest friend for many years,” and that they met while “we were both attending Columbia University.” After elaborating on JK’s character and honesty, he adds: “Naturally, no man has all the superlative virtues I seem to be attributing to Mr. Kerouac; nonetheless, he is the only man I know into whose hands I could entrust the use of my saxophone, fountain pen or wife and would rest assured that they were honorably and properly taken care of.” He also asks for JK’s current home address.

August 1952: JK writes two short sketches, “Rocky Mount 1952 (again) While Hitchhiking back from Norfolk Va” and “Rocky Mount Car shop (Railroad),” which starts out in the railroad office where he’s possibly applying for that job. First, he compares the local Atlantic Coast Line office–with its “sleep rustle of desk papers & lunch in-the belly–I hate it”–to the Southern Pacific, where Neal Cassady awaits him:

SP is in cool, dry
Western, romantic Frisco
of bays–with–
  hills of purple eve &
  mystery–& Neal
  –here is fuzzy,
  unclear, hot, South,
  hot turpentined poles 
  at tracks that lead
to Morehead City, Sea & 
  Africa–. . . 

He winds up mostly sketching Easonburg again, because it’s “better,” where he sits in his woods with nephew Paul and two dogs, Prince and Bob.

–Little foxy
Prince sits panting
–big mosquitoes–
Big Bob panting
  hard, tongue out,
  licks his mouth,
  blinks eye, big
  tongue flapping over
  sharp teeth–
  drooling–Pine
  needle floor is 
    brown, dry cracky
    odorless–
      blue sky
is sieve above
  tangled dry
vining green heart
  leafing trunking
cobwebbing–
now & then sway 
massedly in upper
  winds–Sun
makes joy gold
spots all over. . . 

Also in August, JK sketches much of his hitchhiking adventure from Big Easonburg to Denver, famously leaving with $5 and arriving with $1.46. This highly entertaining 11-page adventure includes comments on rides into Greensboro, (where he broke his $5 bill for a  15 cents cup of coffee at a truck stop “dinning room”), High Point, and Hickory. He has a lot more to say about those who pick him up than the places he passes through, but this passage is a sketch worth glancing at:

   I got $4.85. 
   Blank Universe stared
me on Main Hiway out of 
Greensboro–storm rose–
driving wet drizzly winds–
I was positive I was lost–
  faces of passing cars–Staring
porch people–bakery trucks–
  but I got a spot ride
to junction–& there in
storm, got ride to High Point . . . 

1953
February 21: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Allen Ginsberg regarding concerns he has over Ace Books’ handling of publicity for other books. It’s reprinted in Collected Letters.

1954
July: JK stays for about 10 days with the Blakes at Big Easonburg.

July 2: JK writes from Rock Mount to Carolyn Cassady, mentioning that he has “just sent “Allen (and Neal) a huge letter in a big manila envelope and it should get there about the same time as this.” That letter has not surfaced. This July 2 letter is reprinted in Collected Letters.

December: In Rocky Mount for the holidays with family, JK dresses as “Father Time” to nephew Paul Blake’s diapered “New Year.”

December 19: JK writes in Some of the Dharma:

As it’s now Dec. 19, 1954, the end of this pivotal year is near–and I am at the lowest beatest ebb of my life, trapped by the police, “retained in dismal places,” scorned and “cheated” by my friends (pamphleteers) misunderstood by my family, meanwhile mutilating myself (burning hands, benzedrine, smoking, goofballs), also full of alcoholic sorrow and dragged down by the obligations of others, considered a criminal and insane and a sinner and an imbecile, myelf self-disappointed & endlessly sad because I’m not doing what I knew should be done a whole year ago when the Buddha’s printed words showed me the path.

He then outlines his austere pan for salvation and addresses himself ominously: “Being famous, he will be hounded to his death.”

1955
January 18: JK writes from New York to Allen Ginsberg that he’s “cleared because of phlebitis from having to pay further alimony to Joan” and adds, “Now I’m all set for desert, soon as I go down to south and clear the country lot my folks bought for house, cutting trees and burning stumps and cutting grass and sowing garden when able. Have nicotine habit, dammit, must beat it again.”

February: JK arrives in Rocky Mount in February to help the Blakes build a new home. His stay, into July, initiates another productive period. While there, he writes The Buddha Tells Us and Wake Up, lots of letters, and the first part of The Dharma Bums.

February 5: JK sends a prayer from Rocky Mount on a postcard to Allen Ginsberg. Each of the 4-line stanzas begins with a variant of emptiness: 

I, Allen Ginsberg am emptiness . . . 
You, Jack Kerouac, are emptiness . . .
Living beings re emptiness . . . 
The Universal Redeemer is emptiness . . . indeed, emptiness is the Universal Redeemer.

February 10: JK writes a 3-page letter, from New York, to Allen Ginsberg that Americans are “seeking rebirth in the Ocean of Suffering: like traffic in a great superhiway and everybody driving to another birth and further graves and dribs and all longfaced and solemn in charnels of their own making, like butchers in bloody aprons at morn regarding the empty blue sky with self-believing huge ignorance.” He adds: 

I’ve discovered that my little nephew in the south, Lil Paul, is Lucien really, and will grow up and be the same. How strange that I have to be hungup now with another 7-year-old Lucien and be his uncle and charged with the responsibility of watching over him and taking him on walks and giving him spiritual instruction, a little blond, green-eyed desperate tortured introspective Lucien with unhappy life. 
   First I go to south, to help build the new family house, dig ditchdes and carry planks and saw boards. Then July, I drive to NY with new auto license in old panel truck of brother’s and pick up my mother and drive her back. . . .

March 4: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Allen Ginsberg, “At present, in south, babysitting & washing dishes for family, writing great new book already half-finished, about Buddha, WAKE UP.” He outlines his plans–NY in May to pick up his mother in Paul Blake’s truck; hitching to Texas in July for two months in the desert; San Francisco in September, before back home in Rocky Mount to work for Paul; then Europe in early ’56, Paris and Tangiers. He adds:

No typewriter so that ends my big dharma letters for a while. Some of the Dharma now over 200 pages, and taking shape as a great valuable book in itself. . . I intend to be greatest writer in the world and then in the name of Buddha I shall convert thousands, maybe millions: Ye shall be Buddha, rejoice!
   I’ve experiences something utterly strange and yet common, I think I’ve experienced the deep turning-about. At present I am completely happy and feel completely free. I love everybody and intend to go on doing so. I know that I am an imaginary blossom and so is my literary life and my literary accomplishments are so many useless imaginary blossoms. Reality isn’t images. But I do things anyhow because I am free from self, free from delusion =, free from anger. I love everyone equally, as equally empty and equally coing Buddhas. I have been having long wild samadhis in the ink-black woods of midnight, on a bed of grass.

This letter is reprinted in Jack Kerouac / Allen Ginsberg: Letters. 

March 25: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Sterling Lord, his agent, that he’s “been living down South here for 2 months, writing a Buddhist book of 70,000 words, which I’m just finishing now.” This letter is reprinted in Selected Letters.

April 15: JK writes from Rocky Mount a letter to Carolyn Cassady in Denver that “my face has changed and I scowl all the time; a smirch of displeasure is printed right on it.”

He writes: 

April is the cruelest month. It has a pretty name. This is the South, piney woods out there where I’ve laid out my mat of grass for meditation sometimes in the dark night, sometimes warm afternoon, sometimes dewy pearly morn, accompanied by two holy dogs, who look to me for the teaching without words, and when I enter the Sampatti of the Tathagata Samantabhadra (Without Words) I telepathize them the news that all things are similarly empty and only seen of the mind itself; but it does them and me no good, tho your flesh be imaginary the sun runs sweat down the line, tho pain be imaginary what can you do? 

This letter and a subsequent undated one, also from Rocky Mount to Carolyn Cassady are reprinted in Selected Letters.

April 20: JK writes from 1311 Raleigh Road, Rocky Mount to Allen Ginsberg: “This is my new permanent address.” This letter is reprinted in Jack Kerouac / Allen Ginsberg: Letters.

May 5: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco that he needs all his manuscripts back and to send them to him in Rocky Mount. This brief letter is reprinted in Jack Kerouac / Allen Ginsberg: The Letters.

May 10 ca: Allen Ginsberg writes from San Francisco to JK in Rocky Mount that he’s “sending two packs of manuscript first class registered and insured to Raleigh Road, they’re wrapped, I take them to P.O. tomorrow. ” This letter is reprinted in Jack Kerouac / Allen Ginsberg: Letters.

May 11: JK writes from Rocky Mount a kind and encouraging letter to Allen Ginsberg. It begins, “Just an additional letter to go with the enclosed clipping and to let you know what I was just thinking in the yard. I don’t think you should be discouraged by the neglect you are receiving. . . ”  He says that Allen is a “great Jewish Bard,” though “unknown, neglected, obscure, poor . . . and classically learned, gentle, cultured, and classically pure as writer of poems. . . . I can jus see it, the Jewish National Hero will be you, a hundred years from now or earlier, Ginsberg will be the name, like Einstein in Science, that the Jews will bring up when they claim pride in Poetry.”

This letter is reprinted in Jack Kerouac / Allen Ginsberg: Letters.

May 20: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco: “Well, today I wrapped up a 10,000 word short story called ‘city CityCITY’ and sent it to Cowley asking him to figure someplace to send it.” He also writes:

I also know that do and don’t are the same thing, I know I can stay right here in this lonely cottonfield and do nothing the rest of my life, or run around and do a million things, it be the same thing. . . As far as I’m concerned the Truth isn’t worth a shit. . . i feel real awful, these guys in NY are killing me at last . . . please do something . . . pray for me, something. . . i want to kill myself . . . my family doesnt even want me to get drunk any more. . . i’m really a wretched paper pauper paoeori like i said. I will write to carl [Solomon]. Please let me know once and for all if you forwarded my letter to Bill [Burroughs] last February. I sent him cityCityCCITY, no answer.

This letter is reprinted in Jack Kerouac / Allen Ginsberg: The Letters and in Selected Letters.

May 20? A typed letter from JK in Rocky Mount to William Burroughs in Tangiers, Morocco, is cataloged by Columbia University Libraries as “ca May 1955” but it clearly is written on or after May 20; it has no envelope. It begins:

Wonderin what you could be doin this dull hot afternoon in the south. Myself of course in desperation I am drinkin moonshine cocktails or punch made with orange juice, ice, ginger ale, & white lightnin. Very good, every time exhilirating yet never heavy like wine or even hangover making.

After describing how dull Ginsberg’s letters from San Francisco are and how much he misses New York–“the big excitement of ball games in bars, beer, village, seeing Stanley Gould, or long walks on the moonlight May waterfront with pint of wine, alone – or French movie.”–he laments his current state:

Here I am in the heart of the cotton fields and tobaccy fields, bored. Of course in the middle of the night, when the orange moon sheds dips from big glory clouds and you don’t hear even a dog bark, and I sit in dark yard in white chair with drink. . . But I’d rather be in the native quarter of Tangiers I tell you.

He encloses a a copy of “city City CITY” and expresses the hope that they can collaborate on it and develop it into a novel. He laments his lack of funds, “dammit, if these people would only pay me for my genius. — hark harock hork.” And he catches Burroughs up on some New York gossip, recounting one evening when everyone had run out on him: “I stood laughing alone in the night, no longer a hero.”

The letter concludes:
ah well, willie, make me happy and drop me note. surer than hell we will be high together again in the fellaheen room night with daves of other cultures and with new visions of our american story. . . you old hero of mine.
[handwritten signature] Jackoff

This letter is reprinted in Selected Letters.

May 23: JK sends his story “cityCityCITY,” from Rocky Mount (again using the Raleigh Road return address), to Malcolm Cowley at Viking Press, and notes, “I’ve just finished a full-length Buddhist handbook. Think Viking would be interested in seeing it? (I’ll deliver it personally).”

May 27: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Allen Ginsberg  in San Francisco that [Robert] Giroux has changed his mind and doesn’t want the Buddhist manuscript. He adds:

Meanwhile the ms. has been sitting neatly typed and ready and idle for a whole month. My sister who is taking over my business or the business managership of my scripts is disgusted and says we ought to pull the manuscripts off from [Sterling] Lord who hasn’t done anything and has the nerve to say that we oversestimate Cowley yet it was only Cowley who’d done anything so far.

He also says he’s broke, suffering from phlebitis, and asks Ginsberg to get a “Jack-California fund together.” He wonders if if Allen knows if Burroughs has done anything with “cityCityCity,” which he’d mailed “at cost of 66 cents stamps.”

This letter is reprinted in Jack Kerouac / Allen Ginsberg: The Letters and in Selected Letters.

June 1: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Cowley, whom he’s heard was “bugged” that JK had changed his name to “Jean-Louis” for a publication in New World Writing “after you’d gone to the trouble of plugging it and myself too in the Saturday Review article.” JK explains: 

I changed my name for no  eccentric beret-and-cravat reason but because I have an ex-wife who is continually trying to get me in the workhouse for non-support and was recently (after the name-change) stymied by a judge’s verdict that, because of my chronic thrombo-phlebitis which I have all the time (all over my body at different times, the brain not yet or I wouldn’t be writing this letter), I am not liable to prosecution but ‘disabled.

He also asks if Cowley received the copy of “cityCity”CITY ” he’d sent “c/o Viking’s a week ago and what you think of it.”

This letter is reprinted in Jack Kerouac / Allen Ginsberg: The Letters.

May 28: JK writes to Arabelle Porter, editor of New World Writing, enclosing the an early draft of his “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.” It’s reprited in Selected Letters.

June 1: A 2-page typed letter to Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco is mostly Buddhist musings, among them: “I’ve sure got it now–continual conscious compassion–Quiet and Alone, interested, polite, dispassionate.”

And as a poem within the letter:

In the solitude of the Love life of Reality –
truly you have nothing to do but rest and be kind and
telepathize Samantabhadra’s Unceasing Compassion.

He notes parenthetically, beside the dateline, that he’s “drinking moonkind shocktells” and reveals he’s plagued by phlebitis “but I think it will be gone in time for me to hitchhike to Denver.” The second time he asks for $25, he adds, “and more if you can, if I had the bus fare I’d roll right on out now – As for my trip to New York, that’s on my mother’s poor $10 and I’ll have to hitchhike both ways and stay on Stanley Gould’s floor.”

On the back of this envelope, he types a poem:

The worm believes,
The saint grieves.
Deranged mankind
Seeks to find.
The enlightened head
Has long been dead.
Reality
Is ghostly.
Made,
Fade.

10 June: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Allen Ginsberg “just a card, letter follows few days.” This letter is reprinted in Jack Kerouac / Allen Ginsberg: The Letters.

14 July: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Allen Ginsberg a newsy and upbeat four page, typed, single-spaced letter. He’s got money now and plans to get to New Orleans, from where he’ll hop freight trains to San Francisco: “Will leave within 2 weeks as I have to help my brother in law’s business moving TV sets while his helper is sick, I get 75 cents an hour and it making more loot for me to hit road with.” He reports on family troubles:

My sister got mad at me and said I thought I was god, I said What, ar ya jealous? O what a dreadful household this is, I’m in, leavin again, everybody resenting my cool Sihibhuto sittings in the morning, cool trances, they work hard to show how busy they are, they putter around, restless, proud, indignant, call me this and that, O if I were not greased cool by the wisdom of the Indes (which is French for Nothingness) I would be madder yet and have more reason to be madder than even in 1952 when I was mad at everybody even you.

This letter is reprinted in Jack Kerouac / Allen Ginsberg: the Letters.

July 19: JK writes  from Rocky Mount to Malcolm Cowley of his plans to go to Mexico and to Sterling Lord about his publishing interests. Both are reprinted in Selected Lettters.

December: After another hitchhiking-in-Mexico excursion that’s the basis for Tristessa falls apart, he wires Memere for bus fare to Big Easonburg, where he spends the last week of the year working on Visions of Gerard.

December 22: In a letter from Rocky Mount (using Paul Blake’s television repair shop , 1311 Raleigh Road, for his return address) to Malcolm Cowley, JK says he has “just hitchhiked 2500 miles with empty truck from sultry whores of Mexicali to Christmas farmlands of Ohio, then because of cold wave bussed back home here in Rock Mount for Christmas.” He describes his newest work:

I now begin work on the first four hears of the Duluoz legend having to do with my brother Gerard who died 1926 at the age of 9, a saint, with nuns at his bedside taking [down[ his dying words in notebooks because of the prophetic visions of heaven he had announced in catechism classroom in the parochial school in Lowell. It will be a novel that will have to reach down into the gray misty trees of my earliest eyeball visions. . .

December 30: JK writes fron Rocky Mount to Carolyn Cassady “just a card to let you know I got home safe,” with a short summary of his rides until home in Rocky Mount. This letter is reprinted in Selected Letters.

1956
January: JK extends his late 1955 stay at Big Easonburg, though he makes a few New York excursions. On January 16, he completes Visions of Gerard.

January 5: JK writes a 2-page single-spaced letter from Rocky Mount to Phillip Whalen that’s mostly re-typing of the Visions of Gerard manuscript, which he introduces:

I’m roaring along on a new novel, or rather, it’s a new section of the endless Duluoz Legend (Duluoz is the curious Breton name I use for Kerouac)–the first four years of my life, and I feel good and am writing well, no tea and no wine and so my mind is sharper. Also I have these woods to meditate in. Piney Woods.

This letter is reprinted in Selected Letters.

January 15: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Gary Snyder, just prior to his leaving for Japan: Me, my letters are like this, long and confused, because that’s my mind, long and confused, I’m writing a dozen things and typing all the time and all fucked up & enthusiastic and shooting baskets in the yard and running in the woods with kids & dogs and so this letter has distraught look.

This letter is reprinted in Selected Letters.

January 16: JK sends a post card from Rocky Mount to Philip Whalen in Berkeley, California:

[in large handscripted capital letters]

MESSAGE FROM MIDNIGHT WOODS

[typed]

O Wise and Serene
Spirit of Awakenedhood
Everything’s Allright
Forever and Forever and Forever
thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you
thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you
thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you

January 16: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Gary Snyder, among other topics, of his plans “to go to New York and then come back to enjoy a gorgeous spring here in the North Carolina countryside.” He also writes to Philip Whalen on this date: “Stop wasting yr time with that idiot Gertrude Stein and that special other idiot what’s his name, Miller, or Hemingway.” Both are reprinted in Selected Letters.

January 17: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Gary Snyder, in Japan, anticipating their meeting in San Francisco after  JK’s “long sweet Spring writing and meditating here in Rocky Mount where the mockingbirds are soon to arrive.” After some Blake & Buddhist musings, he returns to that idyllic notion: “Long days this Spring meditating in my piney woods and writing and continuing my long “Some of the Dharma” which is reports on dhyanas and samadhis and all kinds of Buddhist poems and notes and outcries and is now also over 300 pages long. So I’ll be busy right up till mountain-lookout time.”

This letter is reprinted in Selected Letters.

February 7: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Philip Whalen a 3-page single-spaced letter, reporting that he was offered a job as a “Lookout on Desolation Peak in Mt. Baker National Forest and of course I accepted and sent back an immediate yes-reply, and I can’t help thinking that your recommendation must have had a lot to do with it so thank thank you a million times.” He hopes to do it “every single year from now on.” This letter is reprinted in Selected Letters.

February 10: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Malcolm Cowley, mostly about his projects. He writes: “I’ve used up my American Academy $300 (mostly on wine last year) and am spending quiet Spring typing, trying-to-catch-up-typing my new work. A word from you wil change my atmosphere of gloom, publishing-wise. Myself, I feel good, tho. Anyway, I can hardly wait till you see “Visions of Gerard,” a really holy work.” He includes re-typed portions of Mexico City Blues and Visions of Gerard. 

February 14: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Gary Snyder in Japan a 5-page single-spaced typed letter, much of it an entertaining summary of his recent hitchhiking experiences getting from Mexico to Ohio, where he catches a bus to North Carolina: 

At Springfield, Ohio I was caught in bitter coldwave and had to get off the road and into warm bus and high on Mexicali-bought codeinettas rode on home to North Carolina, got off bus 5 miles off my woods and walked in, with pack, on cold Christmas night, under stars and up there the airplane’s jet stream drifted across the face of the moon and bisected her snow circle, above the pine barrens, as I crossed the dismal lonely railroad track that ran off into the gray blue woods—
     Then got drunk, Christmas eve, and wrote drinking poems:

The giddy fiddlers
Christmas eve
Snowy diddlers
For reprieve

This letter is reprinted in Selected Letters.

February 19: JK types a 1-page, single-spaced letter to Philip Whalen, first apologizing for having “brought up the arbitrary subject of how long our communications should be, and then relating a Buddhist anecdote from his piney woods:

I feel good Just had the greatest week of my life. Last night, the greatest –Aw, a beauteous moon– it was the greatest day of all time, the first real day of spring but coning in February and right after heavy rains that washed everything & left a washed glitter in everything and brown puddles everywhere reflecting China moist sere fields–and strong warm winds whippin snowwhite clouds across the sun, and dry air–a golden day–with a moonlight night, warm, one emboldened frog picked up a croak song at Leven PM in Buddha Creek at Twin Tree Grove here in Big Easonburg N.C. (route 3 woods)–and I’m sittin there realizin The Conception of Living is emptiness, the Conception of Dying is Emptiness, and get a flash, “My lil nephew in ages to come will be a Buddha known as TRUE PINE and softly, miraculously, as I’m standing in the midnight moonlight my cat comes silently and rubs against my legs, come from all over the woods and wildbird bramblepatches to do so, and as I’m tryna write this he grabs my arm my writing sleeve and pulls it to him! Sakyamuni in the moonlight, my poncho makes me look like the Spirit of the Woods, the Shadow, the Shrouded Mon, in the moonshadow woods–I meditate in it, in its warm husk, sittin wrapt–I perceive the unconditioned fucking voidness and the damned buddhas and until I lost my perceiving powers–I pray on my Buddha JuJu beads the Emptiness Prajna Prayer Without End,–I see the potential Immensity of Sampatti Buddhahood but without losing sight of the fact that Sampatti is e m p t i n e s s .  .

Earlier in the day, great event, and I raised a thing silently, sitting under the tree and my hephew facing me asked “What’s that” and I said “That—” and made a leveling motion with my hand, saying “Tathata,” and the repeating, “That–it’s that,” and then only when I told him it was a pine cone did he make the arbitrar distinction of the word pine-cone (“Indeed emptiness is discrimination”)–He said “My head jumped out and my brain went crooked and then my eyes started lookin like cucumbers and my hair’d a cowlick on it and the cowlick licked my chin–when he heard word ‘pine cone.’

Then he told me to take down this poem in COMMEMORATION. He’s 8.

[Paul’s Poem]

The pine trees are wavin
The wind is tryin to whisper somethin
The birds are sayin’ ‘Drit-drit-drit’–
And the hawks are goin ‘Hark-hark-hark’–
O-ho we’re in for danger
Why?
Hawk–Hark! Hark! Hark!
Then what?
Hark! Hark!–Nothin.

February 20: JK’s letter from Rocky Mount to Malcolm Cowley begins:

It’s already spring down here in the piney woods. “Walkin in Jerusalem, Just like John,’ they sing on the radio. At night I see a meteor explode and light up the ground. The blood of the bear is soaking in the woods. You’d really love it if you could sit with me in the Golden Room of the Forest in the afternoons, when you know it will always be a dream, memory will always be a dream, future too, and more amazing, the complete & mysteriously palpable present, a dream —
     Enough Buddhism. This is a “business letter. . . .

He writes that “On the Road” is now “The Beat Generation “and that he wants to call himself “Jean-Louis” instead of “John Kerouac”: “I want to separate my private life from possible publishing life, for reasons of peace & quiet, as here in Carolina now.”

February 24: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Sterling Lord about his publishing concerns and to Lucien Carr that he’s finished writing Gerard. He recounts a recent evening of rambling about in New York with Carr and adds, “I’m drunk tryna type this. Virginia Port.” Both are  reprinted in Selected Letters.

March 2: JK writes from Rocky Mount to Carolyn Cassady in Denver that he sleeps on “a cot on the porch, with typewriter desk, screen to hide . . . all my books are here, hundreds dollars worth of lovely classics in the livingroom, make it look rich, everything, the full Proust brand-new and undirtied, great Blake books etc.”  Because his mother had invested in Paul Blake’s business and was now doing the household chores, Kerouac understood that his part of household contributions was taken care of: “I live here and don’t have to work and even dont talk to anybody and sulk in my room on open porch behind screen and drink corn and pace in yard and meditate in woods.”

March 6: JK types a 1-page single-spaced letter from Rocky Mount to Philip Whalen, in Berkeley, California, part of which reads like a reference letter for himself:

I’m amazed you don’t seem to realize that I’ve already written so much. I’m afraid to go on for fear of being a windbag. I have, alone in the Duluoz Legend (ON THE ROAD, VISIONS OF NEAL, VISIONS OF GERARD, VISIONS OF MARY, VISIONS OF DOCTOR SAX, VISIONS OF THE SUBTERRANEANS, VISIONS OF THE RAILROAD) seven novels unpublished amounting to over a million words; that with BOOK OF DREAMS, BOOK OF DHARMAS, BOOK OF BLUES and everything else (begun VISIONS OF LUCIEN, etc.) a huge lifework already accomplished and don’t think for a minute that it isn’t good either. It’s too good to be true and I don’t know what I shd. do about windbagness, and repetitiousness.

This letter is reprinted in Selected Letters.

March 8: JK types 4-page, double-spaced letter to Gary Snyder, in Japan, which begins: “Received your letter so full of information, your picture of Mt Hozomeen which I have hung up on y wall, and the general good news of your red-ink typewriter.” He offers several examples from the English translation of the Diamond Sutra–“Dharma would be ‘truth law’; Nirvana ‘blown-out-ness; Tathata, ‘That which everything is.”
     He also writes, “I bought a little 5 & 10 black bindbook and on the tiny pages have typed out the Diamond Sutra using above ‘translations.’

This letter is reprinted in Selected Letters.

March 10: Allen Ginsberg writes from Berkeley to Jack Kerouac in Rocky Mount  enclosing a letter from Jargon Press founder and Black Mountain College poet Jonathan Williams. Of that letter, Ginsberg says it “is what it is.” He also informs JK that Robert Duncan is “now in NC also, teaching at Black Mountain, which apparently has a crazy hip crowd. I wrote Williams telling him you were in NC too suggesting Duncan look you up since he read Visions of Neal.”

This letter is reprinted in Jack Kerouac / Allen Ginsberg: The Letters. 

March 13: JK types a postcard from Rocky Mount to Philip Whalen, in Berkeley, California, outlining his plans for meeting soon at “the Place”‘ after he meets with Malcolm Cowley. He adds three unremarkable haiku.

March 16: JK types a letter from Rocky Mount to Malcolm Cowley in Palo Alto, California, at Stanford University, discussing their upcoming editing session on the On the Road manuscript. He explains how a potential libel issue is now resolved and says he has made “completely outlandish dhanges that may add to the humor of the book. He concludes:

     The Rock n Roll craze is on, On the Road is the HIPSTER NOVEL, the time is ripe. . . The GoGoGo situation is really ripe right now in USA.
     Good God I hope you’re not gone when I get there!
     Also I just got a firespotting job in the High Sierras for this summer!

He continues work on Book of Dreams, types up Tristessa, and spends a meditative spring before leaving in March for San Francisco and what will become most of The Dharma Bums.

The day before before leaving Rocky Mount for the last time, he writes to Carolyn Cassady:

I’m now pretty well homeless, my brother-in-law here gets more and more reluctant to have me stay on the porch typing all day and eating his food tho it was originally agreed that my mother’s lifesaving investment in his business and the housework she does would cover me too. He has forgotten his promise. My mother is completely disappointed and has finally decided to follow me to California. So I’m not only coming out to get that damn book cleared and ready but will get a job in Frisco and get an apartment and make things ready for my mother sometime this year.

April 1: Easter Sunday. Gabrielle Kerouac, “Memere,” writes a frantic and very sweet letter to JK at Philip Whalen’s address:

Dearest boy, I’m just about ready to bust. I’m that Worried I haven’t heard from you since you left and my head is working overtime wondering if you got to California safe and in time. . . Well around here things are about the same. No better or no worse, and things unsaid are better that way. I hope you are getting your mail. Ti Nin relays them to you as they come to the shop.  And say Honey did you see Mr. Cowley, and what happened?

Later that year, the Blakes moved to Florida.

December 9: In a letter to Malcolm Cowley, JK outlines his current project, a typewritten scroll which will become The Dharma Bums. After describing in it his adventures with the San Francisco renaissance, “all a true story again,” he adds: 

Then I bum my way back via freights and road to North Carolina, and a holy winter meditating in the woods, then back to the Coast, to a shack to live with Gary [Snyder]. . . It’s a real American book and has an optimistic American ring of the words in it. I’m proud of it. I’m sure you’ll like it.

Sources

Cassady, Neal. to J.C. Clements. San Jose, California: TLS 21 Aug. 1952. Harry Ransome Research Center, U of Texas, Austin, TX.

Clark, Tom. 

Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco, New Directions.  

Kerouac, Gabrielle. Letter to Jack Kerouac. Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters. Ann Charters, ed. New York, Penguin. 1995.

Kerouac, Jack. Book of Sketches: 1952-1957. George Condo, ed. New York, Penguin. 2006. 

Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. New York, Signet. 1959.
   The epigram at top is on page 106; on pages 98-109 are the principal NC-based scenes.

Kerouac, Jack. “[I Am My Mother’s Son]” in Atop an Underwood: Jack Kerouac Early Stories and Other Writings. Paul Marion, ed. New York, Viking, 1999.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York, Signet. 1957.

Kerouac, Jack. Selected Letters: 1940-1956. Ann Charters, ed. New York, Penguin. 1995. 

Kerouac, Jack. from Some of the Dharma, in “The Week in Literature: Robert Lowry’s Book U.S.A”. # 1, Robert Lowry ed. Fall 1958: New York, NY. TMs. Allen Ginsberg Papers. Columbia University Libraries, NY, NY. [This item includes a copy of a letter JK sent to Lowry on October 6, 1958 in which he quotes his own text from Some of the Dharma, and which subsequently becomes the primary text of Lowry’s “Book U.S.A. #1” titled “Jack Kerouac Tells the Truth.”]

Kerouac, Jack. Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954. Brinkley, Douglas, ed. New York: Penguin, 2004,

Kerouac, Jack, to Allen Ginsberg. Rocky Mount, NC: APCS 5 June 1947; TLS 16 July 1951;”Here’s a Prayer towards Satori,” TLS 28 July 1952; TMs 6 Feb. 1955; TLS 1 June 1955; TLS 19 July 1955. Allen Ginsberg Papers. Columbia University Libraries, NY, NY.
    Note: For this webpage, I originally used copies of these original letters from JK to Allen Ginsberg, from the Ginsberg Papers at Columbia University: TLS 4 Mar. 1955; TLS 20 Apr. 1955; TLS 11 May 1955; TL 20 May 1955; TLS 14 July 1955. They are now available in their entirety in Morgan & Stanford’s excellent collection Jack Kerouac / Allen Ginsberg: The Letters.

Kerouac, Jack. to Carl Solomon. San Francisco, CA. TLS 7 Apr. 1952. Allen Ginsberg Papers. Columbia University Libraries, NY, NY.

Kerouac, Jack, to Gary Snyder. Rocky Mount, NC: TLS 17 Jan. 1956; 14 Feb. 1956; 8 Mar. 1956.

Kerouac, Jack, to Malcolm Cowley. Rocky Mount, NC:  TLS 1 June 1955; TLS 22 Dec. 1955;  TLS 10 Feb. 1956; Ms. 20 Feb. 1955; TLS 16 Mar. 1956. 9 Dec. 1957. Malcolm Cowley Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.

Kerouac, Jack. TPcS to Philip Whalen. Rocky Mount, NC: 5 Jan. 1956; 19 Jan. 1956, 7 Feb. 1956; 19 Feb. 1956; 6b Mar. 1956; 13 Mar. 1956. Philip Whalen Papers. Bancroft Library. U of California, Berkeley.

Kerouac, Jack. TLS to William Burroughs. Rocky Mount, NC: 14 July 1947, ca. May 1955. Allen Ginsberg Papers. Columbia University Libraries, NY, NY.

Kerouac, Jack and Allen Ginsberg. Jack Kerouac / Allen Ginsberg: the Letters. Bill Morgan and David Stanford, eds. New York, Viking. 2010.

Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York, Grove. 1983.

–July 16, 2024

This dq is from spring 1956 but currently orphaned: There are piney woods across the cottonfield where I went every day this spring and sometimes in the middle of the night, without lamp, to meditate on bed of grass under tree, and where it all came back to me. Now there are swarms of mosquitos by night and ticks by day–‘s why I wanta go to mile-and-a-half-high plateau this summer.