KEROUAC, Jack (1922-1969). Typed letter signed (“Jack”) to Ed White, 7 August 1961.

Quarto. Single leaf; recto only; one autograph correction. With envelope addressed in autograph, postmarked Orlando, Florida.

"Did you know you were the one who gave me the idea about my new prose? Just sketch, ‘from memory’ etc.”

Kerouac recounts at length drama with his ex-wife Joan Haverty; their relationship had changed rapidly from ecstatic love to misery and rejection, an exaggerated version of a familiar pattern. In this letter he refers to her: “Yes, that Joan ex-wife, after throwing me out, got herself pregnant, then got me arrested and has been harassing my life (and my ma’s) all these years. She’s a victim of litiginous paranoia.” It was a sad period in Kerouac’s short life; he thinks back to their time in college and White's influence on his writing.

He dreams of better days: “Well, maybe you can take a vacation some day and build me a log cabin in the Vermont Hills, with bookshelves, woodstove, kerosene lamp and outhouse.” White would reply with a preliminary floor plan, an answer (at least on paper) to his need for a quiet retreat. “I’m getting sick of writing true stories out of my life, they get so sordid sometimes and scare my family.”

Toward the end of his letter, he writes,

Sometimes I feel like just dropping dead. But I think I’ll manage and not only that, a bright Fall will come, Autumn, golden hills, me on a hill in a mackinaw, me with a bottle of wine beneath the moon, a new world, a new start. It’s been terrible. I shoulda been an architect. But somehow I feel it will suddenly all work out. Also there won’t be no war. I’m feeling that too. So don’t worry about your kiddies.