The Yage Letters.

BURROUGHS, William; Allen Ginsberg. [Jack Kerouac].

Item Number: 116284

San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1963.

Jack Kerouac’s copy of the Yage Letters, signed by co-author and fellow beat Allen Ginsberg. Small octavo, original illustrated wrappers. Third edition. Association copy, signed by Ginsberg on the title page in Kerouac’s hometown, “Allen Ginsberg Lowell 1967.” Kerouac first met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs as a student at Columbia University where he was enrolled on a football scholarship. Kerouac broke a leg playing football during his freshman season, dropped out of Columbia, and soon became enmeshed with the Beats, with whom he would forever be associated and whose characters formed the basis of the majority of his novels. Ginsberg likely signed the present volume during a visit to Kerouac’s house on Sanders Avenue in his hometown of Lowell where he resided with his third wife Stella between 1967 and 1968. Kerouac would die a year later, in October 1969, in Saint Petersburg, Florida. With Jack Kerouac’s Estate stamp and embossed seal from the Executor of his Estate, John Sampas. In near fine condition. An exceptional association copy linking the three most iconic members of the Beat Generation.

In letters to Allen Ginsberg, Burrough's journey to South America and into the Amazon jungle is here recorded, detailing picaresque incidents in his search for the telepathic-hallucinogenic-mind-expanding drug Yage, used by Amazonian doctors to find lost objects, mostly bodies and souls. Ginsberg pruned and edited the writings which contain the first seeds of the later Burroughsian fantasy Naked Lunch.