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Books

Lost Kerouac that should have stayed lost

A review of Jack Kerouac's The Haunted Life: The Lost Novella. Gaucheness and inexperience mark this early work

15 March 2014

9:00 AM

15 March 2014

9:00 AM

The Haunted Life: The Lost Novella Jack Kerouac, edited by Todd Tietchen

Penguin, pp.192, £20, ISBN: 9780141394084

In 1944, when he was 22, Jack Kerouac lost a manuscript — in a taxi, as he thought, but probably in Allen Ginsberg’s room at Columbia University — and it stayed lost until 2002, when it was auctioned at Sotheby’s. Now it has been published, all 70 pages of it, together with some youthful sketches and some letters between Kerouac and his father, in an edition by a professor at Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac’s home town.

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