Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings - Paperback

by Jack Kerouac (Author), Paul Marion (Editor), Paul Marion (Introduction by)

An "indispensable" (Chicago Tribune) collection of more than sixty previously unpublished works from Jack Kerouac, ranging from stories and poems to plays and excerpts of novels

"Fascinating . . . provides a poignant picture of a life brimming with promise."--The Boston Globe

Before Jack Kerouac expressed the spirit of a generation in his classic On the Road, he spent years figuring out how he wanted to live and, above all, learning how to write. Atop an Underwood brings together works that Kerouac wrote before he was twenty-two years old, including an excerpt from The Sea Is My Brother. These writings reveal what Kerouac was thinking, doing, and dreaming during his formative years and reflect his primary literary influences, including the source of his spontaneous prose style.

Uncovering a fascinating missing link in Kerouac's development as a writer, Atop an Underwood is essential reading for Kerouac fans, scholars, and critics alike.

Author Biography

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the "Beat generation" and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of "one vast book," The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.