KEROUAC, Jack - HOFFMAN, Abbie, as Free.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Revolution for the Hell of It. First edition, third printing, Kerouac's own copy of Hoffman's first published book. Hoffman and many of the leading antiestablishment figures of the 60s saw Kerouac as an icon of their cause, a status that Kerouac himself became increasingly uncomfortable with. Kerouac's possession of this book, in some ways a progeny of On the Road, is curious: it may have played a role in his denunciations of the counterculture he had unintentionally become father to.Kerouac's final article, "After Me, the Deluge", was published a week after his death, on 26 Oct 1969 in the Los Angeles Times. In it, he name checks Abbie Hoffman and other Yippies, questioning: "how could I possibly spawn Jerry Rubin, Mitchell Goodman, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsburg and other warm human beings from the ghettos who say they suffered no less than the Puerto Ricans in their barrios and the blacks in their Big and Little Harlems, and all because I wrote a matter-of-fact account of a true adventure on the road" (Kerouac). This bitter repudiation of the "tax-free... hippie-yippie" was published after this printing of Revolution for the Hell of It; it's plausible that some of Kerouac's venom found it's source in Hoffman's quintessentially hippie-yippie book of antiestablishment escapades.Nevertheless, the counterculture icons that Kerouac derides continued to give him credit: nearly 13 years after his death, "On the Road: the Jack Kerouac Conference" brought together Ginsberg, Burrough

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