In the Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts sale from 23 November to 7 December at Christie’s in New York, a selection of these letters will be exhibited for the first time. Rather than texts separate from his oeuvre, these letters often served in lieu of rough drafts, and were penned in the same style as his novels, as if he were practicing, or seeing how it communicated meaning in practice. This extended to writing letters to his friends. Kerouac would write unceasingly for weeks, and then spend months, sometimes years, struggling with his publishers, who insisted on editing his work. Rising in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Beats explored spirituality and adventure, often explicitly portraying the human condition as they saw it in underground and eccentric communities. ‘They will be simple.’ For the father of the Beat Generation, best known for his 1957 novel On the Road, this ‘simple’ style entailed a process bordering on obsession. ‘One day I will find the right words,’ Jack Kerouac wrote in The Dharma Bums.
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