Atop an Underwood

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

Praise for
Atop an Underwood:

Early Stories and Other Writings
by Jack Kerouac

“Kerouac's fans will be delighted with
Atop an Underwood ...
this is as broad a feast as any aficionado could hope for... what startles is how good Kid Kerouac was and how early he defined his themes . . . the beauty of Marion's editorial contribution is that
Atop an Underwood
works as well for new readers of Kerouac as for knowledgeable devotees.”

 

“Offers a wonderful glimpse into the author's formative years. Editor Marion includes notes that illuminate certain sections without intrusion.”

 

“Fascinating to Kerouac scholars and surprisingly accessible to the novice reader . . . provides a poignant picture of a life brimming with promise.”

 

“This is a Jack Kerouac developing his skills, awaiting his muse . . . there are flashes of brilliance, hints of things to come, passages to be underlined and read aloud to friends. Marion's introductions are brief and to the point, intelligent and unpretentious.”

 

“It's good to dip into the early writings and see the confident, hopeful Jack Kerouac who was the source of his own dreams.”

 

“Marion has assembled a collection of Kerouac's early work that is fascinating in what it reveals about his early interests and his early methods ... Keroauc's intense desire to be a writer hit him early and stayed with him his entire life. This passion colors all of this early stuff . . . And his themes are all here: America, travel, jazz, the delicate presence of death ... the passion Kerouac brought to all of his writing is here.

 

“It should come as no surprise that Kerouac's salient literary features—his Whitmanesque appetite for both experience and electrifying description, his love of motion and music, and his persistent autobiographical streak—are already present in his youthful work.”
—ALA Booklist

Paul Marion was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1954. He is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Lowell and has published several collections of poetry. His most recent book is
French Class: French Canadian-American Writings on Identity, Culture and Place,
of which he is the editor and a contributor. He lives in Lowell with his wife and son.

The Town and the City

On the Road

The Subterraneans

The Dharma Bums

Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three

Maggie Cassidy

Mexico City Blues

The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

Tristessa

Lonesome Traveler

Book of Dreams

Pull My Daisy

Big Sur

Visions of Gerard

Desolation Angels

Satori in Paris

Vanity of Duluoz: An

Scattered Poems

Pic

Visions of Cody

Heaven & Other Poems

Pomes All Sizes

Good Blonde & Others

Old Angel Midnight

The Portable Jack Kerouac

Selected Letters: 1940—1956

Book of Blues

Some of the Dharma

Selected Letters: 1957—1969

Orpheus Emerged

Book of Haikus

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

 

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 1999
Published in Penguin Books 2000

Copyright © the Estate of Stella Kerouac,

John Sampas, Literary Representative, 1999
Introduction and commentary copyright © Paul Marion, 1999
All rights reserved

 

“Count Basie's Band Best in Land; Group Famous for ‘Solid' Swing”
first appeared in
The Horace Mann Record,
February 16, 1940.

 

Grateful aknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts
from “Blues in the Night” by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen.
© 1941 (renewed) Warner Bros. Inc. All rights reserved. Used by
permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, Florida.

ISBN : 978-1-101-55062-5

1. Beat generation—Literary collections. I. Marion, Paul.
1954—II. Title.
PS3521.E735A—20052
813'.54—dc21

 

 

As I am, so I see.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

Are you he who would assume a place to teach or be a poet here in
the States? The place is august, the terms obdurate.

—Walt Whitman

 

 

Always considered writing my duty on earth.

—Jack Kerouac

When Jack Kerouac burst on to the American scene in 1957 with his Roman candle book
On the Road,
he had been a writer for more than twenty years. He later defined what it means to be a born writer: “When the question is therefore asked, ‘Are writers made or born?' one should first ask, ‘Do you mean writers with talent or writers with originality?' Because anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing.” The clarification was rooted in his understanding of the word
genius
as meaning “to beget.” Along with creating more than twenty books, Kerouac knew he had invented a new way of writing, fusing local talk, blown jazz, a scribe's eye, relentless self-examination, the grammar of dreams, memory glee, and gloominess about our short lives.

For someone who felt he was born to write, Kerouac spent his youth “busy being born.” And so this is Jack Kerouac's book about becoming a writer and an artist. Unlike
Some of the Dharma, Book of Blues,
and other books of his published since he died in 1969, Kerouac had not prepared the manuscript of
Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings.
He did, however, leave an enormous cache of writings in carefully organized files, the source of this book and others to come. His papers are an extraordinary record of an artist's development.

 

 

Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings
takes its title from a book of stories Kerouac imagined publishing in 1941. Readers of Kerouac's novel
Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education,
1935—46, will recognize the title because he brings it into his story about Jack Duluoz growing up in America. After working all day in a gas station in Hartford, Connecticut, Duluoz would head back to his digs: “I was happy in my room at night writing ‘Atop an Underwood,' stories in the Saroyan-Hemingway-Wolfe style as best as I could figure it at age nineteen.” Kerouac's readers have long wondered about the real stories written in Hartford in the fall of 1941. Do they exist?