Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings [Hardcover]

Jack Kerouac (Author), Paul Marion (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 1999

A powerful insight into the making of a free spirit and literary pioneer

Before Jack Kerouac defined a generation with his 1957 classic On the Road and became one of the most prolific voices of Beat culture, he was learning how to live, and above all, how to write. Atop an Underwood brings together more than sixty previously unpublished early works which Kerouac wrote between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one, ranging from stories and poems to plays and parts of early novels, including an excerpt from his 1943 merchant marine novel, The Sea is My Brother. Readers, scholars, and critics will find in this book a fascinating missing link in Kerouac's development as a writer.

His lifelong themes of America, adventurous travel, spiritual questing, work, family, and sports show their first sign of life in Atop an Underwood. The writings reveal what Kerouac was thinking, doing, and dreaming during his formative years and reflect his early literary influences; readers will also find here the source of his spontaneous prose. In the first words that he ever wrote, Kerouac proves that he was born with a passion for words and for living.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Jack Kerouac's buddy William Burroughs once told an interviewer that Jack had written about a million words by the time he turned 22, and poet and editor Paul Marion publishes 80,000 of them for the first time in Atop an Underwood: jazz reviews written in high school, several rushing headlong poems, short stories (Kerouac dashed off some 200 during his 1941 stint working in a Hartford gas station), essays, radio plays, self-exhortations, an excerpt from the novel The Sea Is My Brother. Marion takes what he calls a "documentary approach," grouping together pieces by period, subject, circumstance of composition. And what emerges from the whole is a terrifically fresh, vivid, and engaging portrait of the Beat artist as a young man.

Kerouac, even in his teens, was riffing on his big themes--the restless quest for meaning along "the marathon alleys of life"; the lonely majesty of "the real, true, America, America in the night"; the fleeting pleasures of love, sex, comradeship, food, and drink; the compulsion to set down his experiences in swift, fluid prose. There are no buried masterpieces or stunning revelations here, but every piece hums with the spontaneity and immediacy of Kerouac's voice. Reading these youthful jottings is like hanging out at one of those all-night bull sessions when Kerouac and his pals "talked about eternity and infinity and the government and Reds and women and things..."

"I will write a play about life as life is and I will wait till it hits me in the face before I write it," he proclaimed when he was 18. "Then I will rush to my typewriter and write it. So hold on to your seats. It will soon come and I feel terrifically exuberated right just now." Atop an Underwood is a record of the many forms that exuberation took during the years when life first started to hit Kerouac in the face. --David Laskin

From Publishers Weekly

"I am part of the American temper, the American temperament, the American tempo," writes a teenage Kerouac in a prophetic 1941 prose fragment, one of the 60 such pieces in this collection of Kerouac's juvenilia. These fugitive pieces, previously unpublished, provide a tantalizing glimpse of the future Beat generation originator, spanning Kerouac's adolescence and his first years in New York. The themes here would later find expression in On the Road and the Duluoz series: his French-American heritage, with its idiosyncratic English; his mystical identification with America; and, taking cues from Whitman, his vision of art as a means to unfold the authenticity of the self. The best pieces are the short sketches written in Hartford in 1941. Kerouac crafts, diary-style, a catalogue of daily activities (working in a cookie factory, living in a cheap apartment) while experimenting with the rhythms and forms he derived from his reading of Thomas Wolfe and William Saroyan. In the early '40s, Kerouac lived in several diverse social spheres. He worked in Hartford, attended Columbia University on a football scholarship, was kicked out of Columbia, enlisted in the Merchant Marines and simply bummed around. It is evident that radio had an overlooked influence on Kerouac's style. A piece like "Howdy," which begins, "Howdy. This is Jack Kerouac, speaking to you," obviously takes its formal cues from radio broadcasts. The last section of the book is less interesting, excerpting a section of a novel Kerouac wrote about the Merchant Marines. Although this book shouldn't be a starting place for new Kerouac readers, there is enough real Kerouac bebop here to interest even his more casual fans. (Nov.) FYI: The publication of this collection will coincide with the publication of the second volume of Kerouac's selected letters.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 249 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (November 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670888222
• ISBN-13: 978-0670888221
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,644,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), the central figure of the Beat Generation, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922 and died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969. Among his many novels are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Visions of Cody.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, May 19, 2005

By 

Kenneth M. Goodman (Cleveland, Ohio United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings (Mass Market Paperback)

I'm liking this book way more than I expected I would.
Most of the selections were written by Kerouac between the
ages of 16 and 23. Sure some of them reflect the early author's
innocence, but virtually all have fascinating insights.
Here's a good example: One of the best selections concerns
Jack's one-day employment in a sweat-shop cookie-making factory.
Check out this quote: "Shorter hours will provide the laborer with a new desire to live, not to be a productive animal, but to have time to be a man, to have time to enjoy the rights of man in the use of his divine intellect, a gift of God that is overlooked by our overloads of the present Industrial Era."
AMEN.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars atop an underwood, January 7, 2000

By 

steve kevlin (spanaway wa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings (Hardcover)

a good book into the mind set of a young JK. It takes you into the young mind of JK and lets you see how this excellent writer started. Alot of short stories of how jack got into writing and we all know the results of those young days. A must of a JK fan and a good book to have in your own JK library

steve

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Must" reading for all Jack Kerouac fans., March 3, 2000

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings (Hardcover)

Use Paul Marion's Jack Kerouac Atop An Underwood (88822-2, $24.95) as an accompanying volume surveying his early stories and other writings: this gathers over sixty previously unpublished pieces from Kerouac's personal files and represents a treasure trove for any avid Kerouac reader. Both are highly recommended, even essential picks for any Beat collection.