KEROUAC, Jack (1922-1969). Typed letter signed (“Jack”) to Ed White, April 1957 with Joyce Glassman manuscript fragment to verso.

Quarto. Single leaf of yellow lined paper; both sides, single spaced, with lower half of verso double spaced around lines from Joyce Glassman’s holograph manuscript for Come and Join the Dance ; Kerouac’s autograph postscript and a handful of emendations. With envelope addressed in type, postmarked New York, New York.

"By the way, you started whole new movement of American literature (spontaneous prose & poetry) when in that Chinese restaurant on 125th street one night you told me to start SKETCHING in the streets...”

Kerouac and White's correspondence fully resumed with this letter, rich in word-sketching from his hike through the landscapes of Provence, capturing the same scenes as Cezanne, and from the Louvre, offering his unique Beat critique of that ageless collection. “So I went to Paris and in the Louvre stuck my nose up against Van Gogh and Rembrandt canvases and saw they are the same person,” he writes. Jack was in complete empathy with Van Gogh, writing that his “maddest pic is of those gardens Les Somethings, with insane trees whirling in the blue swirl sky […] almost silly but divine.” “So I will paint what I see,” he concludes, “color and line, exactly FAST.”

On the verso of the leaf, his typed words are carefully positioned around Glassman’s writing that runs in the opposite direction; despite his consideration – he never actually obscures her hand – he notes only in passing, “pay no attention, this is a chapter from my girl’s book...[then in autograph] (the ink).” The writing consists of a dozen or so lines from the opening of Chapter Six from Come and Join the Dance. Published five years later in 1962, it would be her first novel.

Notably, in his postscript, Kerouac recalls an important conversation from his and White's days together at Columbia. After his statement about White starting a “whole new movement of American literature,” he writes, “Tell you more later…this is big historical fact, you’ll see…(word sketches). And how in Dickens did you know always I wd. become painter somehow?”