The Town and the City

The Town and the City is a novel by the American writer Jack Kerouac , published in 1950 by Harcourt Brace. It was the first major work published by Kerouac, later made famous by his second novel Unterwegs (1957). Like all of Jack Kerouac's major works, The Town and the City is primarily an autobiographical novel, though not as straightforward as most of his other works. The Town and the City was written conventionally over several years, and the work was more fictional than after Kerouac's appropriation of the quickly written "spontaneous prose". The Town and the Citywas written before Kerouac developed his own style and is strongly influenced by Thomas Wolfe effect (until the title of Wolfe's work The Web and the Rock German (: wove and rock ) recalls).

As the title suggests, the novel focuses on two locations: on the one hand, the early circle of the Beat Generation in New York City in the late 1940s, and on the other, the small town of Galloway, Massachusetts, from which the protagonist comes before he thanks to one Football scholarship goes to college. Galloway represents the town of Lowell , Massachusetts , through which the Merrimack River flows and where Kerouac grew up. The experiences of young Peter Martin battling for success on the high school football team are largely that of Jack Kerouac. In his last work Vanity of Duluoz , which appeared in 1968, he comes back to this subject.

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The title "City" depicts several figures from the early beatnik circle : Allen Ginsberg (as Leon Levinsky), Lucien Carr (as Kenneth Wood), William S. Burroughs (as Will Dennison), Herbert Huncke (as Junky), David Kammerer (as Waldo Meister), Edie Parker (as Judie Smith) and Joan Vollmer Adams (as Mary Dennison). Towards the end of the novel, the character of Waldo Meister dies when she falls out of the window of Kenneth Wood's apartment. This is a distant echo of the real event: David Kammerer, who is probably stabbed to death by Lucien Carr in self-defense. In the novel, the police assume a suicide. A version of the events that is closer to the truth can be found in Vanity of Duluoz .

History of the manuscript up to publication

Kerouac began writing The Town and the City in late 1945, according to Ellis Amburn, who edited Jack Kerouac's last two novels and wrote the biography Subterranean Kerouac . He sent the completed manuscript to Thomas Wolfes publishing house, Charles Scribner's Sons, in 1948 . Kerouac told his friend Allen Ginsberg that he was hoping to meet with Wolfe's editor, Maxwell Perkins , not knowing that Perkins had passed away the previous year. Scribner's refused the book.

Ginsberg turned to Mark Van Doren , his former professor from Columbia University (who had also attended Kerouac), for help. Van Doren arranged an interview with Alfred Kazin, who worked as a literary scout for Harcourt Brace. Kerouac failed to make it to the interview with Kazin, but Ginsberg introduced Kerouac to New York editor Ed Stringham, who organized a meeting between Kerouac and the editor-in-chief at Viking Press . Kazin read the manuscript and recommended the book to others.

In December 1948, Scribner's again rejected the manuscript, despite the changes Kerouac had made to the text. That same month, Little, Brown and Company also rejected the book and refused to publish it because of its excessive length, which meant that the book would be priceless for a first-time work. The main cost of publishing a debut novel is the cost of the paper and cover, and a long book makes it more difficult for the publisher to cover the cost.

After reading excerpts from The Town and the City and Kerouac's unfinished work Doctor Sax , Mark Van Doren recommended the novel to Robert Giroux from Harcourt Brace in March 1949 . Giroux, like Van Doren and Kerouac, was associated with Columbia University. Giroux was impressed by the 1,100-page manuscript, which he compared in terms of lyricism and poetry to Wolfe's look homeward, angel , and he offered Kerouac an advance of $ 1,000 on his royalties. He requested that the manuscript be shortened to reduce production costs. According to Kerouac's friend John Clellon Holmes, The Town and the City took months to complete under Giroux's supervision. Giroux wanted a 500-page novel that could be sold for the then standard price of $ 3.50 per copy. After several months, the proofs were completed in November 1949. The publication date was set for February 1950, with a circulation of 15,000 copies, of which 10,500 were bound. The additional 4,500 sets were put into storage should additional copies be required. The English publisher Eyre & Spottiswoode bought the British rights to the book and prepared a separate edition for 1950.

Kerouac decided to use the name "John Kerouac" for the book. However, later paperback and hardcover editions used the name "Jack Kerouac" instead of John. Kerouac dedicated the book to Robert Giroux, "Friend and Editor". Giroux informed Kerouac that the film producer David O. Selznick was interested in acquiring the rights to the book. The publication of the novel was finally postponed to March 2, 1950. The book received good reviews from Charles Poore, who reviewed it for the New York Times , and John Brooks, who reviewed it for the Book Review . The book was panned by critics from the New Yorker and Saturday Review . The book was unsuccessful, and in September 1950 Kerouac complained in a letter to a Worcester, Massachusetts critic who had praised the book that it was no longer selling. Kerouac stopped making money from The Town and the City as his royalties did not exceed his advance payment and a film never came off. Later, in 1951, Giroux rejected the novel On the Move, as well as all of Kerouac's other works that were submitted to him over the years. The rejection of Unterwegs ended, as it were, Kerouac's personal and business relationship with Giroux, whom he had considered a friend, as well as his business relationship with Harcourt Brace. It would be another six years before he republished when Viking Press, at Malcolm Cowley's insistence, published On the Move.

Text output (original)

The Town and the City Harcourt Brace, New York 1950