Ginsberg, Allen

An archive of correspondence from Ginsberg, but also including Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Orlovsky, to Jan Kerouac. New York, San Francisco, and Colorado, 1977-1988

Overall 14 pieces of correspondence, comprising🦄 8 autograph postcards signed, 5 autograph letters signed, and one printed letter (ranging from about 90 x 140 mm to 280 x 216 mm). Various letterheads, including Naropa Institute letterhead. Generally very good condition, with 🔯folds and handling wear, as expected.

Jan Kerouac was the only child of the pioneering Beat author Jack Kerouac. Though they met only twice when she was 9 and 15, after his death she followed in his footsteps, and became a twice-published author before her untimely death at the age of 44. The present archive shows Jan as she began to move into literary circles that included her father's peers, and the support they offered as she wrote her first book, the autobiography Baby Driver.

Throughout the archive, Ginsberg offers Kerouac advice on the publishing industry: encouraging her to reach out to certain editors, offering feedback on her writing, dissuading her from working with certain agents, and so on ("For the love of god don’t sign anything (contracts) till you examine"). In a letter from 18 November 1977, he responds to her suggestion that she change the working title of her autobiography to "Off the Road" to encourage her to stand on her own literary merits: "... your name already mirrors your 🍷father suffici🥀ent, & your prose is your own extension of your named self, no need to fall back on gimmick, I was really proud of what you wrote, what I saw."

Elsewhere, he encourages her to get in touch with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose imprint was looking for pieces to publish: "Ferlinghetti/City Lights is putti𝐆ng together his bi-annual Journal, is looking for prose, so try him for your opening section of mss." The fruition of which is also seen in a postcard from Ferlinghetti, dated 20 November 1977: "Excited about your EVER-THREADS + have read enuf to say I want to use this Part One in City Lights Journal, going to typesetter this Monday." 

An interesting archive related to the legacy of the Beat Generation, through the only child of Jack Kerouac.

PROVENANCE:

The Estate of Jan Kerouac