Jack Kerouac, Malcolm Cowley, and the difficult birth of On the Road

Tsk, tsk: the author of this piece fails to mention the long-lost--but recently found--Joan Anderson letter, written by Neal Casady. Kerouac himself attributed Casady's style in the letter to helping him find a style appropriate to Road. Kerouac considered the letter to be a literary masterpiece in its own right and arranged to have Ginsberg, then affiliated with Ace paperbacks, to submit it for publication. Ginsberg sent the only copy to a friend in San Francisco to be submitted to a little press in San Francisco and then invented a story about the letter--at this point legally a manuscript?--being lost overboard off a houseboat. The little press went out of business. Ginsberg’s lie probably discouraged any effort to find the letter. When the little press went out of business, the landlord dumped its office’s contents left behind in the building’s lobby. An accountant working in the building went through this garbage and carried some of it home, where it found a place in his attic. Fast forward forty years. The accountant dies. His daughter comes to clean out her father’s house. She asks a friend to help. They find a box and an envelope: Casady’s Joan Anderson letter. The Kerouac Estate is quite a legal mess. A Florida court found that a purported will was fraudulent, but I'll leave that issue aside because the Estate has been a good steward of Kerouac's writing--unlike the Joyce Estate. Complicated rules attach to letters. A physical letter is the property of the recipient, but IP rights remain in its author, as J.D. Salinger found out when his letters went up for auction. Salinger was saved by Peter Norton--you may have heard of his "Utilities" who bought the letters and gave them to Salinger. Casady's heirs have a claim. Other rules apply to manuscripts. This one was thrown in the trash and California has rules that vest ownership in anyone who finds treasure in someone else’s disposed-of trash, such as the accountant. A Sotheby’s auction was halted at the last minute. A settlement was reached among the parties and the letter now is archived at Emory University.

Jack Kerouac was quite misogynistic in real life and this unfortunately comes through in his work. Makes it hard to read.

On The Road was an inspiration to me in high school. I ended up doing a solo road trip around the west coast when I was 17. Met some interesting people. Mostly it was quiet. Not nearly the excitement I had hoped from the open road.

I’m not sure if it was his writing as much as the idea of him that I was infatuated with. Anyway, thanks Kerouac.

I have long adored Kerouac and devoured everything he wrote as well as all the biographies about him. Thanks for posting this article, it was a pure delight to get some insight into the seldom covered battle to publish the book.

I went down an epic rabbit hole the other day—rabbit labyrinth is more like it—reading about what happened to the children of the Beat writers. It started here:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/10/24/the-female-pi...

That's an intro to a novel by Jan Kerouac—Jack's daughter—which is newly reprinted. It (the intro) is well written and her (Kerouac's daughter's) story is incredible.

That led me to this classic 1995 piece, "Children of the Beats", written by the son of one of Kerouac's lovers:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220408162741/https://www.nytim...

He tracked down and interviewed several of his literary 'cousins': other children of Beat writers and scenesters. If, like me, you are fascinated by how the lives of artists intertwine with family dynamics, that article is unputdownable. And, of course, profoundly sad. All of this material is tragic.

Through that I started reading about Lucien Carr, the golden boy of the Beats who had been their lead shaman—a few years before Neal Cassady showed up—until he stabbed a man to death under murky circumstances that a Hacker News comment is too short to get into.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Carr

That led me to reading about the children of Lucien Carr, one of whom—Caleb Carr—was a military historian who later became an accidental celebrity by writing "The Alienist", a 90s classic of the historical-serial-killer genre. Caleb Carr became an excellent writer too, though as far from a Beat as a writer could be. He talks about (let's call it) the trauma field that he and his peers grew up in with extraordinary eloquence.

https://www.salon.com/1997/10/04/cov_si_04carr/

He said this about his father and his buddies Ginsberg and Burroughs: "The one thing that their lifestyle did not factor in was family." To hear about this from a child who had to deal with it all, albeit decades later, is to me a entirely compelling thing.

He used his money from his bestsellers to buy a small mountain in rural New York and build himself an 18th century refuge:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150529181658/https://www.nytim...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCrt8Pir7jA

He died last year a month after his last book came out. His publishers thought they were getting another serial killer bestseller. Instead he delivered a memoir about his cat, whom this interviewer pushes him to agree was the love of his life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zqGaXl1Zg0

His mother left Lucien Carr and married a man who had three daughters, who grew up with Lucien's three sons in what Caleb (the middle son) called a "dark Brady Bunch".

Lucien lived for 11 years with Aline Lee, another former lover of Kerouac, and her daughter. A few years ago a blogger who is into Beat history did this interview with the daughter, which of all these pieces is probably the saddest, and which again I couldn't stop reading. If you can read this without your heart feeling assaulted, you're more resilient than I am:

https://lastbohemians.blogspot.com/2022/04/christina-mitchel...

I was never attracted to the Beats aesthetically, except for Burroughs in a semi-horrified way. But the mythology of the Beats as Bohemian free spirits has carried a lot of sway. There's a principle that the shadow side of the artist's life plays out in the family. If you ever wanted to learn about how this works, this is a case to study.

Here is what the son of Neal Cassady, the icon of beatific spontaneity, said in the 1995 interview I linked to above:

"By the 60's, Dad was so burned out, so bitter," John Allen says. "He told me once that he felt like a dancing bear, that he was just performing. He was wired all the time, talking nonstop. I remember once, after a party, about 2 A.M., he went in the bathroom, turned on the shower and just started screaming and didn't stop. I was about 15 then and I knew he was in deep trouble, that he was really a tortured soul. He died not too long after that."

Good book. I never laughed louder or smiled wider than the part where he becomes a Mexican cotton picker.

It is a good thing that on the road exists, it tells a vivid truth about america that many millions have experienced but very few put down in words My grandmother left NYC in 1929 with 3 other recently graduated nurses and drove a model A ford to california when there were still patches of prairy that had to be driven over, and in the 90's I drove there useing mostly back roads, bought a school bus in Vancouver for $50, and drove it back to Nova Scotia, though ended up chatting with Keasy at the country fair....got invited to the farm, but was in a hurry going south got a copy of on the road in a cleminites box, with a stack of state maps from the time it was written that I found all perfectly preserved in the rafters of my shop

Once I found out the beats were mostly gay it changed how I viewed them much as I didn’t want it to change how I viewed them. I even read all of William Burroughs and thought he was the only in the group but he wasn’t.