KEROUAC, Jack.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

"Visions of Gerard" - galley proofs from the estate of Robert Giroux. Three galley proofs for the first edition of Kerouac's fictionalized tale of his childhood, from the estate of Robert Giroux, the father-figure publisher who launched his career. The "Readers first proof" has approximately 12 manuscript corrections by Kerouac; all three - the "Readers First Proof", the "Marked Set", and the "Final Proof" - have manuscript annotations by Giroux.Editorial material relating to the publication of Kerouac's books is rare. We can trace only three galleys for Kerouac publications on the market in the last 50 years, and only one - a first galley proof for Big Sur (1962), also from Giroux's estate - is of comparable importance. The others were galleys for "In the Ring", an article published in The Atlantic (March 1968), and for his non-fiction collection Lonesome Traveller (1960).This trio of proofs shows Farrar, Strauss and Company's creation of Kerouac's "great big old sad book about the life and death of my little brother Gerard back in the 1920's, a funereal, gloomy, drizzly Buddhist book, and one with prose in it indeed" (Kerouac, letter to Gary Snyder, 17 January 1956).Kerouac had been working on Visions since the mid-1950s and finally wrote it in two benzedrine-fuelled weeks at his sister Nin's kitchen table. It is one of his most overtly spiritual novels, in which his sibling is presented as a Buddha-like child, saint-like in his sickness and suffering. Though one of Kerouac

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