KEROUAC, Jack (1922-1969). Typed postcard, signed in type (“Jack Kerouac”), to Ed White, postmarked 15 July 1947, Jamaica, New York.

"On my way to San Francisco next week to get a ship, will be passing through Denver around 22nd to 24th, and would like to see you then.”

A pleasant opening statement in what would become a decades-long correspondence: the first penny postcard Ed White received from Jack Kerouac. Ed hailed from Denver, and he and Jack met in 1946 in New York as fellow Columbia undergraduates. They shared a sense of restlessness, a need for exploration, and a love of literature, and their letters often circle around the existential question of what kind of men they wanted to become. Their friendship would be influential on both men for different reasons; Kerouac would introduce White to the earliest incarnation of the Beat circle, and White—an architect—would most famously suggest over a fateful meal that his friend try a more artistic, fluid way of writing. Kerouac would later write in his letter of 1 March 1965, "To think that all that crazy stuff I've written since 1951 in a way started when you casually suggested, in a Chinese restaurant on Amsterdam and 124th, remember? to try 'sketching,' which I did, and it led to discovery of modern spontaneous prose."

The present postcard reached White in Denver in the summer of 1947 and announced the beginning of Kerouac's first cross-country excursion that would be chronicled in the opening chapters of On the Road, published exactly ten years later. He introduces a few important Beat characters, mentioning that Hal Chase is “hiding out in the mountains” and that Neal Cassady might be in Denver, and reveals his plan to join up with his friend Henri Cru in San Francisco.