KEROUAC, Jack.

Desolation Angels. [with] Jack Kerouac's Wedding Announcement Autograph Postcard Signed.

FIRST EDITION OF JACK KEROUAC’S DESOLATION ANGELS; with Kerouac's personal wedding announcement to Joan Haverty on an autograph postcard signed by him

New York: Coward-McCann, 1965.

$10,800.00

Out of Stock Item Number: RRB-148959

Custom Clamshell Box (+$450)

* Custom Clamshell Boxes are hand made by the Harcourt Bindery upon request and take approximately 60 days to complete

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First edition of this classic autobiographical novel by Kerouac featuring "one of the most true, comic, and grizzly journeys in American literature" (Time). Octavo, original cloth. Very good in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by Sam Salant. Introduction by Seymour Krim. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box made by the Harcourt Bindery. Accompanied by Kerouac's personal second wedding announcement to Joan Haverty on a handwritten postcard to Mr. Ed White, laid in. Duodecimo, one page, handwritten, the postcard reads in full, "Sir - A mere card may sometimes announce the Apocalypse, and as I’ve had my private 2nd coming in marriage to Joan Haverty, 20, space, paper, and glue would only interfere with this one gratuitous opportunity for brevity. Ahem, and as I've heard of your new and forthcoming plans, what is there to say but come on - I am going to Mexico with wife in May - or June - and can think of no better place for Fulbrights, Lint-pockets and Buck O'Jeff, (A great girl, a great Grace has fallen to me) (Letter coming.) La vie en rose ne vien de commencer... Jack." Jack Kerouac married Joan Haverty in 1950, though their turbulent union lasted less than two years. Haverty later gave birth to their daughter, Jan Kerouac, and wrote her own memoir, Nobody’s Wife (1990), which offered a candid counter-narrative to Kerouac’s mythologized life, shedding light on the personal costs of his restless creativity and unconventional lifestyle. In fine condition.

"Each book by Kerouac is unique, a telepathic discord. Such rich natural writing is nonpareil in later 20th century, a synthesis of Proust, Celine, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Genet, Thelonius Monk, Basho, Charlie Parker and Kerouac's own athletic sacred insight. Jack Kerouac was a 'writer' as his great peer William S. Burroughs says" (Allen Ginsberg). This autobiographical novel covers a key year in Jack Kerouac's life—the period that led up to the publication of On the Road in September of 1957. After spending two months in the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington, Kerouac's fictional self Jack Duluoz comes down from the isolated mountains to the wild excitement of the bars, jazz clubs, and parties of San Francisco, before traveling on to Mexico City, New York, Tangiers, Paris, and London. Duluoz attempts to extricate himself from the world but fails, for one must "live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry."