Kerouac, Jack | Typed letter signed to Allen Ginsberg, refusing to help promote Junkie

Kerouac, Jack

Typed letter signed ("John Kerouac") to Allen Ginsberg, refusing permission for Kerouac's name to be used in the promotion of Junkie

One page (276 x 213 mm). [Rocky Mount, N.C.], 21 February 1953, return address "c/o MCA, Mrs Phyllis Jackson, 598 Madison Ave, New York, N.Y." printed below signature; fold marks, some toning and spotting, mainly marginal.

Jack's formal and indignant refusal to comply with Ginsburg's request.

In early 1953, Allen Ginsburg had approached his friend Carl Solomon with an aim to get in touch with his uncle, the owner of Ace Books. He sent William Burroughs's first book, then titled Junk, and Kerouac's On the Road. Kerouac refused Ace Books' request to revise his writing, and the publishers eventually turned down his work while accepting Burroughs's. Allen Ginsburg then sprinkled a little salt in the proud Jack's wounds by calling him a "holy fool" for not making the revisions. It comes as no surprise, perhaps, that when Ginsburg consequentially asked him to send a "plug for Bill as intense and hi-class as you can make it" for Junkie, Kerouac angrily refused:

"I do not want my real name used in conjunction with habit forming drugs while a pseudonym conceals the real name of the author thus protecting him from prosecution but not myself" and continues: "Especially I do not want to be misquoted as saying that I 'dig the pseudonymous William Lee as one of the key figures of the Beat Generation.'"

REFERENCE:

Selected Letters: 1940–1956, ed. A. Charters, pp. 397-398