Cummings, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Penn Warren and other prominent literary figures. But I’m still alive.It's being offered as part of a collection that includes papers by E.E. “But it doesn’t matter now,” he added with a chuckle. “At the worst, he said it just to stick it to me.
“At the best, he forgot that I gave it to him,” Stern said. Only one question remains: Why did Ginsberg say Stern tossed the letter? It is but gentle fog thru which I navigate and make friendly by constant intimate communion.” “There are no unexplored paths in my mind and few that are not entangled in the weave of my misery mists. “I am fettered by cobwebs, countless fine creases indelibly etched on the brain,” he tells Kerouac in a paragraph that includes strikeovers and penciled corrections of a couple misspelled words. Profiles in History released a snippet of the letter to The Associated Press that hints at Cassady’s abilities as a wordsmith. 17, the auction house Profiles in History is putting the archive up for sale. There it stayed until Los Angeles performance artist Jean Spinosa was cleaning out her late father’s house two years ago. When Emerson folded Golden Goose, he gave his archives, including the still-unopened letter, to a business associate, who took the material home. Ginsberg sent the letter to Richard Emerson at Golden Goose Press, and he didn’t bother to read it. “Soon thereafter, Allen started that rumor,” he said of the tale that he had thrown the letter overboard. If Stern hadn’t dropped the letter off that boat, Kerouac told the Paris Review in 1968, the writing would have transformed his car-stealing, marijuana-dealing, con-man friend Cassady into a literary giant. The result became a literary classic and launched a new style of prose called Beat. After he read it, Kerouac would say later, he scrapped an early draft of “On the Road” and rewrote it in a similar stream-of-consciousness style.
After 50 years, it’s a blessing to be vindicated.”Ĭassady, who wrote the letter over three amphetamine-fueled days in 1950, sent it to Kerouac just before Christmas. “People have written to me and damned me for this. “At least 12 literary publications through the years have accused me,” Stern said. “Yes, I’m the guy who dropped the letter off the boat, but of course I didn’t,” Stern, laughing heartily, said after The Associated Press reported Sunday that the 16,000-word screed to Kerouac from his friend and literary muse Neal Cassady was found intact last week in a house near San Francisco. When a letter credited with inspiring Jack Kerouac to create a new literary genre suddenly surfaced, no one was happier than an 86-year-old poet and playwright from New Jersey.įor more than 50 years, Gerd Stern had been wrongly accused of tossing what Kerouac called “the greatest piece of writing I ever saw” over the side of a houseboat.
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