Letter from the Editors

• Published in: Journal of beat studies 2022-01, Vol.10, p.1-4
• Main Authors: Johnson, Ronna C, Hunt, Tim
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Archives & records; Archivists; Autobiographical literature; Bookstores; Burroughs, William S (1914-1997); Dylan, Bob (1941- ); Editors; Holmes, John Clellon (1926-1988); Kerouac, Jack (1922-1969); Novels; Poets; Roads & highways
• ISSN: 2165-8706

Published in 1957, On the Road remained in print as a mass market paperback with a bright yellow cover and a drawing of a barefoot young woman and man kneeling on the hood of a car in a tight embrace next to their gallon of wine. Even more telling is the marketing come-on lettered between the title and the author's name: "The riotous odyssey of two American drop-outs, by the drop-out who started it all..It wasn't a book to be found in the Literature section of the bookstore along with its canonical peers The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises, to which On the Road was historically compared in its first major review. [...]they point the way ahead to the multiple roads of research and discussion needed in the coming years and decades to map and measure the wide, unforeseen impacts of this midtwentieth-century American genius writer. Rounding out the volume's extensive offerings is our continuing feature, The Beat Index, a compendium of contemporary national and international Beat scholarship, compiled now for the second year by Rebecca L. Aberle, whose resourceful and inventive searches for scholarship that features or touches on Beat writing enriches the research potential for all in pursuit of Beat Studies. The two by Al Gelpi and Tim Hunt separately compile and reprint archival works-a memoir of Kerouac's 1966 visit to Harvard University's Lowell House, and a substantive and long out-of-print 1977 interview with John Clellon Holmes-providing access to otherwise unavailable firsthand documentary historical intelligence important to cultural and literary studies of Kerouac.