KEROUAC'S "OPTIMISTIC DREAM OF THE GREAT AMERICAN ADVENTURE WAS WHAT MADE HIS WRITING ALIVE"

KEROUAC, Jack. Big Sur. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, (1962). Octavo, original half black cloth, original dust jacket. $1800.

First edition, first printing of Kerouac's powerful novel featuring his fictional alter ego Jack Duluoz.

Big Sur was "written in ten nights in October 1961… Kerouac said: 'I typed it first on a roll of paper [like The Dharma Bums]. You know what you do with a roll like that? You don't have to change pages. The secret of narrative—Fielding, Richardson, Dickens, Defoe knew that—is that you get hot when you get disgusted. That's the time not to stop. Just roll along. Later on I type it up double-space on the typewriter'" (Charters A17). Big Sur offers a "humane, precise account of the extraordinary ravages of alcohol delirium tremens on Kerouac, a superior novelist who had strength to complete his poetic narrative… we meet San Francisco's poets and recognize hero Dean Moriarty ten years after On the Road. Jack Kerouac was a 'writer,' as his great peer Burroughs says, and here at the peak of his suffering humorous genius he wrote through his misery to end with `Sea," a brilliant poem appended, on the hallucinatory sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur" (Allen Ginsberg). His "optimistic dream of the great American adventure was what made his writing alive… his vision of the American Innocent, the Original Adam, was dramatized so explicitly that it was as though he were seeing it in front of his eyes for the last time" (Charters, Kerouac, 335). Made into a movie of the same title in 2013. "First printing, 1962" on copyright page. Charters A17.

Book fine, dust jacket near-fine with faintest toning to spine, slight soiling.