Customer Reviews

Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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

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$24.95) as an accompanying volume surveying his early stories and other writings: this gathers over sixty previously unpublished pieces from Kerouac's personal files and represents a treasure trove for any avid Kerouac reader.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.

I came across this book while doing a research paper on Jack Kerouac. Not only did it provide me with some great insight on Kerouac's later works, this marvelous collection of his earliest works is a joy to read in itself. The introductions by the editor also makes this book a must-have for anyone interested in the life of Kerouac and the writings of the Beat Generation.

For starters, for the benefit of the younger set, I should explain the word Underwood used in the title of this compilation refers to a typewriter, an ancient tool used by writers and others in pre-historical times (before the digital age) in order to more quickly tell what they had to say to the world. How primitive, right? Except, typewriter or word processor, a writer is still obliged to have a plan (or plans) to tell his woes to the world. Now I have spent considerable time in this space reviewing many of the major works of the "beat writer Jack Kerouac, including masterpieces of his generation (and my later one) like "On The Road", "Dharma Bums", and "Desolation Angels". And rightly so. Now we come to a compilation of his early writings, thoughts, half -thoughts, sketches for thoughts and a few poems thrown in. In short, we are now in the stage of interest to the aficionado.

The editor of the compilation, Paul Marion, a younger fellow Lowell compatriot and writer of Kerouac's has what can only be described as a labor of love in organizing this work. Jack Kerouac may not have always written material that was unalloyed gold but he wrote a ton of stories and ideas for stories starting from his youth in junior high school in Lowell. Marion has separated out the best or otherwise most representative of the work from about 1936 to 1943 (just before the decisive meetings with the New York crowd, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr, etc., with whom he would make literary history as the core of the "beat" generation writers). For those who want to trace Kerouac's evolution as a writer, what animated him at any given time, how he created that spontaneous writing form that he became famous for, or those who just want to be entertained by stories form the old days of the 1930s and 1940s this is good stuff to run through. For the rest us you NEED to read those three novels listed in the first paragraph, and you had better get to it.

I like Kerouac and I thought it would be interesting to read a book of his early attempts at writing, but this book turned out to be a heap of garbage that would never have gotten published if there wasn't a famous name and picture on the cover. Even Kerouac himself said this stuff wasn't worth reading. I'm surprised they didn't print his grocery lists and the doodles he scribled on napkins. They must be saving that for the next book, "Things we collected from Kerouac's waste basket." This sort of thing happens all the time and its sad... Anyway, I gave this book an extra star because I seem to remember at least one or two of the pieces being at least mildly interesting. I don't recall which ones.