Books

Octavo, 499 pages. In Very Good condition, with a Good plus dust jacket. Spine illustrated with white titling. Dust jacket protected with a mylar covering. Price unclipped: "$3.50". Dust jacket shows mild chipping and wear to all extremities, some tape reinforcement along the interior of the jacket on the rear hinge and lower edge. Boards have light wear to bottom edges. The text block has a small price stamp to the rear endpaper. Signed flat by Kerouac as 'John Kerouac' on the front free end page, unusually signed as such. CX Consignment. Shelved in Case 3. The first major work published by Kerouac, The Town and the City was originally published under the name of 'John Kerouac'. However, for the remainder of his writing career, Kerouac elected to go by the name 'Jack'. This novel shows Kerouac at an early stage in his development as a writer, before his embrace of "spontaneous prose" and deeply indebted stylistically to Tom Wolfe. What is already established here, which would continue through the whole of his oeuvre, are the characters comprising his rich personal mythology and his blending of the autobiographical with the fictional. 'The City' is represented by a cast of figures based on his 'beat' compatriots, while the protagonist is a more fictionalized version of Kerouac himself: a young man from rural Massachusetts seeking success on his high school football team. Kerouac's later works would become more clearly autobiographical, losing the attachment to fictionalization in favor of a prose style that better captures the rich directness of lived experience. Seven years after the publication of Shelved Dupont Bookstore.

The Town and the City was Jack Kerouac's debut novel, published in 1950. It presents a coming-of-age story of a young man who experiences the dichotomy between provincial American life and the attraction of the city. Kerouac's alter ego is Peter Martin. The novel is heavily influenced by the works of Thomas Wolfe and is based on Kerouac's own early life.