Kerouac, Jack

The Town and the City. By John Kerouac. New York:Harcourt, Brace and Company, (1950)



In 8s (9 1/4 x 5 1/2 in.; 210 x 140mm). Publisher's red cloth gilt. Original pictorial dust jacket with photograph of the author by Arni on rear panel; minor wear and fraying at extremities. 

Charters A1a

First edition of the author's first book, inscribed and signed "To Edward Laycock with best wishes Jack Kerouac" on the front free endpaper. Kerouac's first novel was not a commercial success. As the biographer, Gerald Nicosia, points out, "The real satisfaction Jack got from the novel came from the sensitive response of close friends. Ginsberg had been quick to see the correspondence between the three main brothers in The Town and the City . . . and their respective counterparts in The Brothers Karamazov . . . ."  The novel also shows the influences of writers as diverse as Proust, Céline and Saroyan.  Without a doubt, the novel's greatest debt is to Thomas Wolf and Kerouac sometimes described the novel as being "like Thomas Wolf." "The Town and the City is an apprentice work of a major novelist, flawed by an imitative and verbose style, and confused with a welter of tentative approaches, but nonetheless notable for the highly consistent symbolism Kerouac develops to deal with troubling questions like loss, sickness and death." (Nicosia)