Jack Kerouac: Long-lost letter that inspired 'On the Road' to be sold at auction

For many years the letter from Neal Cassady was thought to have been lost

Kerouac said thought the letter was among the finest things written in America (AP)

It was written on a three day drug trip and swerved and weaved. Yet Jack Kerouac thought the letter from his friend Neal Cassady “ranked among the best things ever written in America”, and said it helped inspire his 1957 novel On the Road.

Now, the 1950 letter that was for many years considered to have been lost, is to be sold at auction.

The rambling 16,000-word typed letter was discovered several years ago when it surfaced in discarded files of Golden Goose Press, a now-defunct small San Francisco publisher, and listed for sale by a Southern California auction house in 2014. That auction was suspended after the Kerouac estate and Cassady’s children said they were the owners.

The letter was written in 1950 while Kerouac's friend was high (Christie's ) (Christie's)

The three parties are now said to have reached an amicable agreement and Christie’s will auction the letter in June 16. It is expected to sell for up to $600,000.

“Thought long-lost, only resurfacing in 2012, it has permeated virtually every conversation about the Beat era since its writing,” said the auction house.

“Referenced not only by Kerouac, but by Allen Ginsberg, Laurence Ferlinghetti, Herbert Hunke, and a host of their contemporaries, Cassady’s fluid, incantatory, and deeply revealing prose influenced the entire generation of Beat writers and gave Kerouac the model for his own literary revolutions.”

Cassady would later admit that it was written while he was high on Benzedrine and it offered an unvarnished account of his love life in 1946, particularly with Joan Anderson (whom he visited in a hospital after a failed suicide).

Kerouac said he loved the 1950 letter from his close friend (Christie's ) (Christie's)

Kerouac loved the letter and he told his friend so. “I thought it ranked among the best things ever written in America… it was almost as good as the unbelievably good ‘Notes from the Underground’ of Dostoevsky,” he said.

“You gather together all the best styles… of Joyce, Celine, Dosy… and utilise them in the muscular rush of your own narrative style & excitement. I say truly, no Dreiser, no Wolfe has come close to it; Melville was never truer.”

When Kerouac was interviewed by the Paris Review in 1968, he credited the the “spontaneous style” of On the Road as having been developed from The letter will be on public view starting on May 31 in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and then New York, where the sale will be held.