Lost and Found: Jack Kerouac’s First Novel

Travel Blog  •  Eva Holland  •  03.04.09 | 1:11 PM ET

It looks like another previously unpublished Kerouac novel has surfaced, and is set to land in bookstores in the near future. “The Sea is my Brother” was written while Kerouac worked in the merchant marine, and according to his notes it tells the story of “the vanishing American, the big free by, the American Indian, the last of the pioneers, the last of the hoboes.” (Via The Book Bench)

Tags: Jack Kerouac, Literature, Literary Travel

Eva Holland is co-editor of World Hum. She is a former associate editor at Up Here and Up Here Business magazines, and a contributor to Vela. She's based in Canada's Yukon territory.


1 Comment for Lost and Found: Jack Kerouac’s First Novel

Robert Downes 04.23.09 | 7:57 PM ET

Kerouac also co-wrote a book with William Burroughs called “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks”—a very early book written when he was 21 or so.

I’ve got a chapter on JK in my new book ‘Planet Backpacker,’ if anyone gives a rip.  Here’s a excerpt from my website: http://www.planetbackpacker.net :

As a young man hitch-hiking around America in the late 1940s, beat writer Jack Kerouac scribbled his observations on a pocketful of scrap paper each day—notes that went on to become the heart of On the Road.
  Long before he was lionized as the voice of the beats in books such as On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur and The Subterraneans, Kerouac was a traveler.  Specifically, one who made his way close to the earth: hitch-hiking, jumping trains, riding buses.  A traveler who stayed in skid row flophouses and on the couches of friends or in the beds of sexual conquests. Not to mention long periods at his mother’s house in Queens (parental succor is one of the dirty little secrets of being a young adventurer).
  What would Kerouac be doing today? I wondered during a solo trip around the world last year—an odyssey that involved mountain biking across Europe and backpacking on through Egypt, India and Southeast Asia, recounted in my book, Planet Backpacker.
  Blogging, no doubt—Kerouac loved to type and is said to have had an athlete’s endurance at the keyboard, typing more than 100 words per minute.  And—brace yourselves, cynical hipsters—the writer who penned the world’s greatest hitch-hiking novel would probably be neck-deep in today’s equivalent of thumb-tripping, which is backpacking.

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